The Ark Sakura (18 page)

Suddenly the effects of all the beer I had drunk began to tell on me. Filled with a mixture of revulsion and anticipation, I could not look squarely at her. My pulse was pumping like a treadle under my ears.

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean it’s embarrassing because I haven’t got anything to tell.”

“Look, why don’t you let her off the hook?” It was the shill, coming to her support for once. Was there some secret between them he didn’t want her to divulge? “There’s no way she could get out of here on her own, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because one of the loan collectors who’s after me wants
her
as security. Let’s get back to where we were. We’ve all shown our tails now, and we’re all on an equal footing. You can be honest with me, Captain, so tell me, what’s going on? Who
is
that character I was chasing before?”

The insect dealer resettled himself on the parapet and began to rock backward and forward; apparently the beer had dulled his fear of heights. The girl, still sitting cross-legged, stretched out her arms, her clasped hands turned palm out. Her too-short skirt was like a rope around my neck. The gazes of all three of them seemed to grab me by the lapels and shake me without mercy.

“I truly do not know. Until I heard you tell about him, I had no idea—the whole idea was frightening. But the more I think about it, the more it explains. You see, I was blaming it all on rats. Would you mind telling me in detail what you saw?”

“You first. I’m not going to have you changing your story to fit mine.”

“Relax, will you?” The insect dealer changed his forward-and-back motion to a right-and-left sway. “Here’s our chance to prove to the captain that he wasn’t wrong to let us on board.”

“Watch out, don’t fall!” the girl cautioned. Abruptly he ceased moving, as if caught in a freeze-frame.

“My story is simple. Somebody poked his face in from a back tunnel, so I followed him. That’s all.”

“Are you sure it was a person?”

“What else could it have been? There sure as hell aren’t any rats that big.”

“To tell the truth, for some time now I’ve sensed the presence of an intruder. But it’s too quick for a human. I’ll see something move out of the corner of my eye, and by the time I look that way, it’s gone. The center of your field of vision registers shapes, but the periphery is sensitive only to movement, you know. So a rat and a person
could
look the same.”

“Does a rat wear sneakers and a jacket? I’ll grant you he was fast. Seemed right at home in there, too. He followed a complicated course, and kept running ahead without ever slowing down or showing the least hesitation. Just when I’d think I had him cornered, he’d find a way out. He knew his way around, all right.”

“How far did you go?”

“How do I know? I doubt if I could find my way back again, either. We went down a couple of flights of stairs, but it was uphill most of the way. Twice we came on running water, and once it was wide enough and deep enough to call it a sort of river.”

“You went all the way
there?”

“That’s where I lost him. Just when I thought I had him, he vanished into the air. How on earth he got over that river I can’t figure out. Aren’t there any other ways in and out of this place? There must be.”

“I don’t know too much about that end.”

“Well, I sure hope it doesn’t turn out that somebody you didn’t know about’s been living over there, watching every damn thing you do.”

“Did you notice a peculiar smell?” asked the girl.

“Yeah, maybe I did,” he said.

“Just before the river there was a narrow bottleneck, wasn’t there?” I asked. “That’s the far boundary of the quarry. I’ve had it in mind to close that off—but still, it’s unbelievable! It’s a good four miles that far and back, as the crow flies, and you’ve got cliffs, valleys, and all kinds of hurdles in the way. I never thought those people would go so far as to cross over that boundary.”

“‘Those people’?
Then you
do
know something you’re not letting on.”

“Oh, they’re nothing to worry about. The Broom Brigade, they’re called—an old people’s club.”

“The broom what?” The insect dealer, who’d been sitting stiffly, stuck out his paw. His glasses slipped askew. His right eye was watering.

“The Broom Brigade. They do volunteer work, sweeping and cleaning, as a public service. Their average age is seventy-five.”

“And they live somewhere in this quarry?”

“No, they probably just use it for their garbage dump. In any case, they’re over two miles from here. You remember, don’t you, Komono?” I said, using his name for the first time. With some trepidation at this change in our relationship, I went on, “On the shortcut, that slight outcropping of rock—”

“That’s it! It
was
the smell of garbage,” interrupted the girl, her mind still on the same track.

“But why would a cleaning brigade come spying around here?” The shill too had a one-track mind. “And whoever was doing the running wasn’t any seventy-five years old, either.”

“It might have been someone from the supervisory squad. I gather they use younger people for supervisors.”

“Is it a large battalion?”

“Thirty-five to forty men. They work only late at night, so hardly anybody’s ever seen them. They go around in a straight line, swinging their brooms in time to martial songs.”

“Sounds creepy.”

“As far as I know, nobody’s ever complained about the noise. They sing in hushed voices, so the sound must get mixed in with the sighing of the wind and the swish of their brooms.”

Layer upon layer of heavy, relaxed inebriation settled over everyone but the girl.

The Broom Brigade’s been written up in the local paper; everybody from this area knows about them. It all began with a movement to collect empty beverage cans, organized by a few elderly citizens. They attracted a growing following, and the movement began earning a name for itself as a way of getting old people reinvolved in society and giving them new purpose in life. Gradually it became more structured, with uniforms and a badge showing two crossed bamboo brooms. Clad in dark blue uniforms like combat suits, the oldsters parade around in the middle of the night, when ordinary people are in bed, and sweep the streets till dawn. They work in the wee hours because generally old people are early risers anyway, and because they don’t want to get in people’s way. Imagine them marching abreast in a single row, softly intoning an old war song and swinging their brooms in rhythm, casting a shadow under the streetlights like some monster centipede creeping through the night.

There definitely
is
something creepy about them. The matter of the martial air was debated in the city council, but the issue was laid to rest when one councillor declared that the words, beginning “Here we bide, hundreds of miles from home …” expressed the universal grief of soldiers everywhere, and that to lump this with the “Man-of-war March” was a piece of left-wing radical hokum. The brigade members’ practice of soliciting donations in areas they had swept, moreover, won acceptance with the reasonable argument that it’s only wholesome good neighborliness to give a helping hand to senior citizens seeking to build their own retirement home. As a matter of fact, the city of Kitahama is exceptionally clean. You can walk the streets barefoot without dirtying your feet. Not only that: the city has become a leader in cutting the use of synthetic detergents. How could the authorities fail to be pleased?

“What a disgusting bunch of old men,” snorted the insect dealer. “Must be something wrong with them. Doesn’t sound normal to me.” He slipped down from his perch on the parapet, came over by the table, and rested his cheek in one hand. In the depths of his glasses his gaze flickered. “Basically,” he went on, “nobody who enjoys cleaning up can be worth much. I hate it, myself. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’—you can take that motto and stuff it.”

“Besides,” said the shill, “there’s something disturbing about the whole thing. We don’t know beans about them, and here they’ve been staring up our asses.” As he spoke, he pulled the bowstring on the crossbow and fixed an arrow in place. “What I can’t figure out is where in hell did that spy disappear to? It was like a subway platform out there, steep cliffs on right and left, up to the edge of the water. The only way to escape would be to dive in.”

“Then he must have swum across,” said the insect dealer, sinking to a sitting position on the floor. I did not at all like where he was: from there he could peer though the table legs at the girl, sitting cross-legged on the chaise longue, and see right between her legs.

“Impossible.” The shill too seemed to take notice of the situation. All of a sudden he took aim with the crossbow and put his finger on the trigger. “The other side of the river was a sheer wall, straight up to the ceiling.”

“Put that thing down,” said the insect dealer. Instinctively he snatched up the Uzi that was leaning against the parapet, cocked it, and rose to a crouch. “Save it for when you’re sober.”

A thin smile on his lips, the shill ignored this and pulled the trigger. The arrow missed its target for the second time, skimming by the beer can and ricocheting with a dry scrape somewhere off in the distance.

“Look who’s talking,” he said mockingly to the insect dealer. “Aren’t you a little old to be playing with toys? Or is a gun freak like you happy to get his hands on anything?”

The insect dealer lowered his gun without comment. But he made no move to go back under the table. The girl started to speak, then clamped her mouth shut.

Flicking the bowstring, the shill added, “Captain, what do you say? Shall we head back to that river for a look?”

“Too late now,” I said. “Better wait till the sun comes up.”

“Underground, what difference does it make?” he protested. “There’s no day or night in a cave, is there?” He slurped up the rest of his noodles and started in on his fourth beer. “My mental faculties are sharpest when I’m drinking, believe it or not. Although noodles and sardines make a hell of a combination.”

“No need to go searching them out, you know,” said the insect dealer, picking up the last sardine by its tail and curling his tongue around it. “If they have something on their minds, they’ll be back.”

“No,” said the shill, “we’ve got to take the initiative. Don’t forget, that place where they’re dumping their garbage is right next door. Who do they think they are, anyway, cleaning up the streets at
our
expense?”

“And it’s not just ordinary garbage.” The girl clung tenaciously to her theme. “That smell is from some harmful substance, I’m positive. You know they say you can make a lot of money cleaning up industrial wastes.”

“That’s right,” agreed the shill. “Whoever heard of building an old people’s home out of the proceeds from street sweeping? It would never be enough.” The two of them seemed to be growing in rapport. “Some ticket for survival,” he wound up sardonically. “Now it turns out we’re being slowly poisoned by toxic fumes!”

A snail covered with wire netting full of gaping holes, imagining itself shielded by a giant shell of some superstrong alloy: how soft-headed can you get! There was a pop in the vicinity of my lower eyelids like that of a tiny balloon. My vision clouded, as tears sprang to my eyes. I remembered having had the same experience when Inototsu locked me up in this quarry, chained like a dog. I read somewhere that there are three kinds of tear glands, each used with a different degree of frequency. These tears probably came from a gland I rarely used; that would explain the popping noise, as if the tear ducts were clogged from lack of use.

“I’ll bet you it was a spy who came to see if the captain was dead yet or not,” said the girl. “Right about now they must be in a tizzy as they find out that (
a
) the captain is still alive, and (
b
) he’s got three new people in with him.” She stared in sudden surprise at my face. “What’s the matter—are you crying?”

“Of course not.” Ashamed to wipe them away, I let the tears trickle down the wings of my nose.

“The captain has no reason to cry,” said the insect dealer, eyes tightly shut, leaning on the table with his elbows planted far apart.

“They could be tears of mortification,” said the shill with emphasis, spraying a mist of saliva. “A ship’s captain can’t very well sit back and watch while his air supply is slowly poisoned, after all.”

“I told you before—I’m going to close off that passageway just as soon as I can get to it.”

“No, you’ve got to act now. Look, that guy came poking his nose in here only a little while ago. What’s the Broom Brigade anyway? Just a bunch of decrepit old street cleaners. Let’s go have it out with them!”

“Or we could simply assert our territorial rights, much as it might inconvenience them,” said the insect dealer, crawling up on the table like a wounded sea slug.
“They
look on it as a garbage dump, but we can put the space to far more significant use. Remember, Japan is a very small country, suffering from acute space deficiency, getting worse all the time… .”

“What are you going to do, plant a flag?” The girl kept staring curiously at my tears.

“Why not?” said the shill. “That or something else.” He spoke with great assurance, driving his words home. “The thing to do is to see that they give us service at a special rate, or pay us for the space they’re using. Somehow we’ve got to draw a firm line.”

Despite small individual differences, overall it appeared that everybody but me was in favor of some form of association with the Broom Brigade. I had a sense of double defeat: first the spy and then, as if that weren’t humiliation enough, the fact that it was the shill, not me, who discovered him. The Broom Brigade, for its part, having had its spy exposed, would surely be devising some swift countermeasure. If a confrontation was inevitable, what better time than now, when I was flanked by two self-appointed bodyguards?