Presently it came. Keitaro thought that he could avoid being suspicious if he deliberately got on after they did, so he lagged behind the others. The woman stepped up onto the motorman's platform, almost treading on her long coat trailing behind her. But, unexpectedly, the man, contrary to Keitaro's thought that he would immediately follow her, showed no sign of doing so. He remained stationary, his hands in his cloak pockets.
Only at that moment did Keitaro realize that the man had escorted her only to see her off. Actually, Keitaro was more interested in the woman. If the two had to separate, he wished of course to abandon the man and stand by her to know her destination. It was, however, only about the conduct of the man in the black fedora, not the woman, that he had been entrusted to report on by Taguchi, so he restrained himself from leaping onto the streetcar platform.
From the motorman's platform she gave a little salute with her eyes and disappeared within the car. As it was a winter night, all the windows were closed. She did not take the trouble to open one and lean out. Nonetheless, the man remained motionless, waiting for the car to start. It began to move, electric power carrying the lighted windows southward as if it had recognized that there was no further occasion for an exchange of goodbyes between the two. The man took the cigar from his mouth and threw it to the ground. Then turning around, he went back to the concourse that forked into three streets, this time heading left and stopping by the foreign goods shop. The streetcar stop there was fresh in Keitaro's memory, the place where the stranger had run up against him, causing him to drop the bamboo walking stick.
Keitaro stealthily followed his man. As he looked at various items in which he had little interest — neckties in the new fashion, top hats, blankets with fancy stripes — he thought that this furtiveness was taking the fun out of spying. He was not ready to say he was tired of the work, but now that the woman was gone, he suddenly began to feel to a much greater degree the constraints imposed on him, although they ought to have been the same as before. Since he had been asked to observe the man in the black fedora for only two hours after his alighting from the Ogawamachi stop, he had already done his duty, so he would sooner return to his boardinghouse and go to bed.
The streetcar that the man seemed to be waiting for came. He laid his long hand on the iron rod at the entrance and lifted his body adroitly onto the car, which had not yet come to a complete stop. Keitaro, who had been hesitating until then, suddenly thought he hadn't a moment to lose. He jumped up into the car. It was not that crowded, so there was enough room for the passengers to see each other's faces. As soon as Keitaro entered the car, he attracted the attention of several who were already seated, among them the man in the black fedora. In the man's eyes Keitaro saw a surprised recognition, but nothing of the suspicion of being spied on. Relieved, he chose a seat on the same side.
He wondered where the streetcar would take him and, looking toward the front of the car, saw "For Edogawa" written in black characters. Each time the car came to a halt, he stole a furtive glance at the man, prepared if the other should transfer to do the same. The man was looking mostly either straight before him or down on his lap, his hands all the while in his pockets. His demeanor seemed to be that of a person lost in musing over something without actually thinking about anything in particular. But as the streetcar was nearing Kudanshita, he began glancing out the window, often craning his long neck, as if trying to ascertain something. Keitaro too was drawn into peering through the window into the obscurity outside. Presently, above the noise of the running vehicle, his ears caught the sound of raindrops striking the windowpanes. He looked at the bamboo cane he was carrying, wishing it were an umbrella instead.
Ever since they had been in the restaurant, Keitaro had taken notice of the man's personality and also of the look in his eyes, which seemed to indicate that he had no doubts about the world around him. The result was that Keitaro suddenly thought it much more sensible, even though it was late now, to speak frankly to the man and to report to Taguchi only those facts which the man himself admitted, rather than trying to gather material under such restricted conditions. With this thought in mind, Keitaro began to devise the best means of introducing himself.
Meanwhile, the streetcar came to the end of the line. The rain seemed to be getting heavier and heavier, for when the car halted, the sound of a downpour suddenly attacked Keitaro's eardrums. The man in the fedora muttered to himself, "What a bother," and lifted the collar of his cloak and rolled up his trouser cuffs. Keitaro used his walking stick for support as he rose from his seat.
As soon as the man got off into the rain, he caught one of the rickshaws coming up for hire. Keitaro hired another at once. "Where to, sir?" his rickshawman asked as he lifted the shafts. Keitaro ordered him to follow the rickshaw ahead of them. The man shouted and began running desperately.
When the rickshawman had run the straight road to a point below the police box on Yarai Slope, he again asked which way Keitaro wanted to go. The other rickshaw was nowhere to be seen. Keitaro raised himself from under the rickshaw hood, but not a trace of the other was in sight. He was at a loss about where to direct the rickshaw in the driving rain, his walking stick held firmly against the rickshaw floor.
3: The Report
The Report
When Keitaro opened his eyes, he thought it odd to find himself in the six-mat room to which he was so accustomed. All the events of the previous day seemed real. Yet they also seemed like an incoherent dream. To describe it more exactly, they seemed like a "real dream." They were also accompanied by the memory that he had acted on the streets in a state of intoxication or rather— this was the feeling that was strongest in him — that the world itself had been overflowing with an aura of intoxication. The streetcars and their stops were filled with it. The jewelry store, the tanner's shop, and the signalman with his red and green flags were imbued with the same atmosphere. The second floor of the restaurant with its light blue paint and the gentleman with the mole between his eyebrows and the fair-complexioned woman who had taken seats there, all were wrapped in it. The unnamed place in their talk and the coral the man had promised the woman, these too were endowed with a kind of ecstasy. And what was saturated most with this feeling and what had played the greatest part was the walking stick. And that moment in which he had been perplexed about which direction to take — the bamboo stick in his hand against the floor of the rickshaw, the rain beating against the rickshaw hood — that moment had been a scene just before the fall of the curtain in which this ecstatic feeling had reached its zenith and he himself had seemed like a person possessed.