The Informer Page 7

  Suddenly he felt terribly jealous of Ogino. Their marriage mightn’t be perfect, and she mightn’t really love him, but it was Ogino—who else—who had made her the passionate woman she was. The recognition of this was most unpleasant, almost unbearable.

  “This was the real thing, wasn’t it?” Eiko whispered as if she’d been reading his mind.

  “How has he been treating you?”

  With one impatient tug at the blanket he uncovered her nakedness . . . Toshiko had been lying. There was no trace of scars anywhere on the smooth white skin. Even so, Ogino’s right to use her body as he pleased seemed to be a sacrilege he no longer could tolerate.

  Intrigued by his angry stare, she said, “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I heard he’s been violent with you.”

  A knowing smile put dark shadows under her eyes. “That’s not entirely untrue. Sometimes he does hit me when I make him angry, but not hard enough to leave a mark.” Once more she pressed her face against his chest, and as she talked, her lips were moving on his skin. “He’s not the only one to blame—I have my faults, too. Sometimes I pull back into my shell, and he doesn’t know what to do with me, and then he gets really mad . . .”

  Segawa didn’t know what to say, so he just kept stroking her back from the nape of the neck to the full curve of her buttocks.

  “. . . He’s very impatient, and has a few other faults as well, but of the two of us I’m the worst, I’d say. This is the first time I’ve ever deceived him since we got married, but in fact I’ve been a bad wife to him throughout these years. He loves me in his own way and tries his best to make me happy, and I respect him for this . . .”

  She seemed determined to bare her soul to Segawa, as well as her body.

  “. . . At first I tried hard to become a good wife, but I just couldn’t make it. The more I told myself I must fall in love with him, the more depressed I became, and the gap between us widened further. And the more I worried over this, the worse it got . . .”

  Suddenly she sat bolt upright on the bed. Tears were running down her face, her glimmering breasts rose and fell rapidly, and her voice became harsh and accusing.

  “And all this because of you,” she almost shouted. “Why did you throw me over and go away? Why? . . . Why did you hand me to him?”

  The brief pause that followed was filled with the thudding of his heart.

  “We talked about this when we separated,” he said meekly.

  “I told you then—as long as I’m with you, I can put up with any hardship.”

  “I understand how you feel, but for men things don’t look quite that simple. Besides, at that time I was completely caught up in the feverish atmosphere of the stock market. A happy life without money was quite incomprehensible to me.”

  With tear-washed eyes Eiko searched his face.

  “Are you saying that your ideas have changed since?”

  “To tell you the truth, they haven’t changed a great deal, be­cause since that time I’ve experienced the misery of being without money. Today my yearning for money may be stronger than ever, but because of the additional experience and the extra years, I no longer think that money is everything . . . I really don’t know whether I’ve improved or become even more greedy.”

  “But money-making and love aren’t incompatible, surely?”

  There was obvious meaning in Eiko’s words, and Segawa be­came a little frightened of what might follow.

  “Maybe not,” he said cautiously.

  “Then if I cut myself loose from my past, will you have me, please?”

  This wasn’t an unexpected plea, and yet it bewildered him. He wanted Eiko for himself alone, but when he thought of other things, he couldn’t give her a direct answer.

  “Are you going to divorce him?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “My mind was made up when I came here with you. No matter how long we try to drag on, Ogino and I are like water and oil. Carrying on in this way is no good for either of us. He’s very sensitive to public opinion, and I’m not sure at all he’d agree immediately, but I’ll try to persuade him anyway.”

  Segawa felt his stomach knot up in panic. In her present frame of mind she was just as likely to tell Ogino right away, perhaps tonight. Once this happened, the friendship between Ogino and him would be finished forever. And with their friendship would go ninety-nine percent of his chances of find­ing out the secret of paramizol. He cursed himself for respond­ing so ardently to her. Love by itself could never be profitable, he thought. To him it was unthinkable to throw away, simply for the sake of love, a job which promised such a high reward.

  “I fully understand how you feel, and I’m so happy you love me like this I almost want to cry, but—”

  “I don’t want to deceive him forever. I’ve never loved him, but in a sense I’m grateful to him, and I certainly respect him. I’d like to make it as easy for him as possible. The last thing I’d want to do is make a fool of him . . . Even for you, it can’t be so easy to keep deceiving your former friend.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but—”

  “So I want to put the facts clearly before him as soon as pos­sible, and then ask him for a divorce. That’s the least I can do.”

  “But to tell you the truth, if you do this straight away, you’ll make things most difficult for me. At the present time at any rate, feeding myself is all I can do.”

  “I’ll work again—I’ll do anything to be with you. I won’t be a burden on you, I promise.”

  “That’s easy to say, but don’t forget that up to now you’ve been a top executive’s wife who knows nothing about the harsh world outside.”

  “Shigeo,” she cried out, a ripple passing right through her naked body, “are you going to run away again?” She threw her arms around him and pushed her body hard against his as if try­ing to enter it by force. “No—I won’t let you go again! I’ll never part with you again, no matter what!”

  Segawa felt the movement of her throat against his arm—it could’ve been a sob. Her rich body drew him, raising a sharp new hunger in him until he felt like crying, but he managed to check his passion.

  “I’ll never let you go either,” he said hoarsely, “but please, will you wait for just a little while? I’m in the middle of a big job right now—I’ve staked my life on it, truly—and until this job’s finished, I must act very carefully. Will you wait till I fin­ish the job—will you? Will you promise not to say anything to Ogino till then?”

  “How long is it going to be? How long do I have to wait?” She pleaded like a little girl.

  “Two months at the most, but if I’m lucky it may be less than a month . . . Until then you shouldn’t breathe a word about us to anybody.”

  “Two months—can you promise that?”

  “Yes. By then I’ll have worked something out, and in the meantime we’ll be able to meet every now and then. Because of the nature of the job, I can find time during the day without much trouble.”

  Eiko nodded, her tear-wet face against his chest. Then her hands gently began feathering his back. He felt her soft warm mouth, and the trembling of her body within his arms, and heard her shaken, urgent whisperings.

  In the evening of the following day Segawa was hanging around the Shichiyo Chemical Company’s plant at Senju. He was waiting for Setsuko Kondo to leave the grounds. Driven by a new sense of urgency, he had decided to start working on her straight away.

  When he had made his promise to Eiko, he wasn’t really confident he could complete the job in two months. In that emotional atmosphere he couldn’t ask her to wait any longer than that, and in any case, his common sense told him some­thing would develop by then.

  Actually, it looked as if the job would have to be finished in much less than two months. Sakai must’ve had a reason for mentioning one month. It also seemed quite impossible for Ei
ko to deceive her husband for any length of time. She wasn’t good at cheating or telling clever lies like a bar hostess. He just had to hurry up with the job. Every time he started thinking about this he became terribly impatient and irritable.

  If at all possible he wanted to avoid telling Eiko about the nature of his work, let alone asking her for help. He was going to leave this until last, to be used only if all else had failed. He couldn’t imagine what Eiko would say if she was told he was a spy.

  Her words that she respected her husband and didn’t want to make a fool of him had scared him. If she found out he was de­liberately trying to betray Ogino, his closest friend, her love for him might die, and she might warn Ogino.

  If this happened, he’d be left with nothing. In addition to his job, her love and Ogino’s friendship, he’d lose his self-confidence, which was fragile enough already. He’d be left then with the label of a shameless man who had returned evil for good. Once this happened, everything would be finished.

  With a bitter frown Segawa threw away his cigarette and squashed it with his toe. This enforced idleness had made him smoke constantly, and now he had a vile taste in his mouth and his stomach was turning queasy.

  Being a spy was not easy, he thought. Even the simple job of intercepting somebody required this much effort. The flow of people through the gates had now dwindled to a trickle—it was more than an hour since the siren went. What the hell was she doing? Had he missed her when the rush started?

  At last he saw her coming through the gates. With her hair carelessly fastened with a ribbon and her face without make­up, Setsuko Kondo looked like a girl student returning home from an examination. The white lab coat she wore at work lent her some professional dignity, but now she looked quite childish in her simple white blouse and grey skirt.

  He let her pass and then followed her from a distance. Com­pletely unaware of being shadowed, she walked briskly to Minami Senju station and boarded a Joban train. He followed a couple of seconds behind. Should she notice him, he thought, all he had to do was go over to her and say hello—it was as simple as that.

  At Nippori station, when she’d got off the train to change to the Yamate line, Segawa gave her a pat on the shoulder from behind. She spun around and blinked a couple of times, and then her face broke into an easy smile of recognition.

  “Mr. Segawa, isn’t it? . . . Mr. Ogino’s friend?”

  “That’s right—it’s nice of you to remember my name. I saw you hurrying past here and thought I’d say hello.”

  “It’s nice of you to recognise my face after such a short meet­ing” she said, returning the compliment.

  “Where do you live?”

  “At Higashi Nagasaki, on the Seibu line.”

  “Then you have to change trains at Ikebukuro station. That’s fine—I’m going to Ikebukuro, so we can chat for a while.”

  The train pulled up and they got in. Segawa suppressed a sigh of relief. The thing was going better than he’d expected. As a friend of the executive director, he was above suspicion in Setsuko’s eyes. And she seemed impressed that a man like that had taken notice of her.

  She might be a research worker assisting a famous scientist, and she mightn’t wear make-up, but she was still a girl, and most girls had a dream in common, Segawa thought. The dream was that a handsome prince would appear out of the blue with a marriage proposal on his lips. To put it in an old-fashioned way—it was the dream of marrying into the purple.

  When a man was a close friend of an executive director of a big company, he might be acceptable as the object of such a dream. Of course, she didn’t realise there were all sorts of close friends from top to bottom, and he happened to be one who was completely broke.

  They made small talk until the train reached Ikebukuro, and then he boldly asked her to have dinner with him, wondering if she’d refuse.

  Setsuko made some polite noises about being expected at home, and not being dressed properly, but soon she accepted. He took her to the most expensive restaurant in the area. Since he was the close friend of an executive director, he couldn’t be too stingy.

  “And how about your work?” he asked pleasantly. “Are you enjoying it?” Slowly he began to work on the poor girl—she was so excited, her cheeks turned a rosy pink. “I must remem­ber to keep my voice down, but Ogino says it’s going to be a great thing.”

  “Well, it’ll have a wide range of applications, and we hope we can produce it fairly cheaply, so the company naturally ex­pects a lot from it.”

  Segawa nodded firmly like a man who knew exactly what was going on. “Yes,” he said, “Ogino told me the test stages have been most promising.”

  Setsuko took the bait smoothly.

  “Well, as you probably know, Dr. Nishiwaki has almost fin­ished his part of the work. There’s one final test still to be done before we’re ready for the patent application. We’ve already or­dered the new machine from Germany so that production could start without delay.”

  Segawa controlled his gasp. If the thing had gone that far, he must move faster—much faster. Once the official application for the patent was lodged, the whole intelligence operation be­came meaningless.

  With pharmaceutical chemicals there were always produc­tion problems, and in most cases the application was made for the patent of the production process itself. Laying his hands on a sample of the material so that it could be analysed didn’t mean he had successfully completed the assignment. Obtain­ing a sample through this girl wasn’t nearly enough.

  “When are you going to apply for the patent?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’ll take three to four weeks to complete the final test and to evaluate all the data from it, so I’d say it’ll be immediately after that. At the moment we’re very busy on that test.”

  “I’ll bet you are. It must be pretty hard on a young girl like you.”

  “Oh, not really. I’m only an assistant—it’s Dr. Nishiwaki who’s working really hard. I’m full of admiration for him. On many occasions he stays at the lab all night, working right through.”

  “Does he stay on by himself?”

  “Yes. There’s a fastidious little part of him which resists the idea of other people poking their noses into his business. I’d love to be more help to him, but he tells me a girl can’t stay on till all hours of the night, and he sends me home.”

  “He’s quite right, of course. It’d be rather dangerous for an attractive girl like you to go home on her own late at night. There are plenty of wolves around, you know . . . Some could be waiting just for you . . . Well, from what you tell me, it seems the new product is almost entirely Dr. Nishiwaki’s own achievement?”

  “Oh, yes, definitely. I’d say that apart from the lab chief, Mr. Yasuhara, there isn’t another person in the whole research sec­tion who’d even know the details.”

  This was to be expected, he thought, but now he had it con­firmed. That wasn’t bad for one night’s work. It seemed then the people who knew the secret of paramizol were the inven­tor, Nishiwaki, the lab chief, Yasuhara, and possibly the two executive directors, Ogino and Okamura. The only remaining question now was how much Setsuko knew, and how much the secretary, Fujita, knew?

  Thinking it might be unwise to stick to the subject too long, he began to change the conversation.

  “Well, Dr. Nishiwaki is obviously the best man the company has, so everything must be all right while things are in his hands. But since he’s so absorbed in his work, he can’t have much time left for his wife. I’m inclined to feel a bit sorry for her. What do you think?”

  Setsuko made a funny face. She looked as if she wanted to say something but managed to control herself. “I don’t know much about that,” she said in an expressionless voice.

  Had she, by any chance, heard some rumour about Sadako’s behaviour, Segawa wondered. But he felt there wouldn’t be much point in ques
tioning her about it here. Anyway, he must de­vote some time to preparing her for his next meeting with her.

  Yes, there seemed to be no other way—he had to sweep her off her feet, he thought as he lit a cigarette. Both her face and body left him absolutely cold, but then neither would he feel guilty about putting an end to her virginity—he’d probably be doing her a favour, anyway.

  Time was flying now. During the following week he met Eiko once and Setsuko twice.

  Setsuko was a tedious companion, as he’d expected. Her conversation was very limited, and she couldn’t dance at all. She grew up with only a mother in the home, and she’d spent all her time studying to carry out the wishes of her dead father who had been a chemist. She had no spare time for anything outside her work.

  This, of course, suited Segawa’s purpose admirably. Firstly, it was very easy to bring her under his influence. This would’ve been much more difficult with a woman who knew all the good things in life. Every time he took her somewhere or showed her something, Setsuko reacted like Alice in Wonderland. When he ordered a very ordinary western dish that cost about 1,000 yen, she enthused over it as if it were some rare exotic food from the sea. Admittedly, he knew far more than the average person about expensive and fashionable places of entertain­ment, thanks to the experience gained during his high period at Kabutocho. The net result was that he was succeeding one hundred and twenty per cent in the role of fairy prince vis-à-vis this real Cinderella.

  Secondly, since they didn’t have much else to talk about, it was easy for him to steer the conversation to her job, which was the sole purpose of the exercise. Setsuko wouldn’t open her mouth when it came to chemical components or production methods, but he could gather other important information, piece by piece, in the course of ordinary conversation.

  For example, the papers containing the progressive research data on paramizol were kept in a small safe, and Nishiwaki had the key to it. There was also a set of photostat copies which he took home regularly. This was a rather valuable piece of information.