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Okay
, Ushikawa said to himself. He was seated in an express train from Tsudanuma
back to Tokyo, arms folded.
Okay, now what? I was able to find some connections
between Tengo and Aomame. Very interesting connections. Unfortunately, however,
this doesn’t prove anything
.
There’s a tall stone wall towering in front of me. It has three doors, and I have to
choose one. Each door is labeled. One says
Tengo
,
one says
Aomame
,
and the third
says
the Dowager from Azabu.
Aomame vanished, as they say, like smoke. Without a
trace. And the Azabu Willow House is locked up tight as a bank vault. Nothing I can
do to get in. Which leaves only one door
.
It looks like I’ll be sticking with Tengo for the time being
, Ushikawa decided.
There’s no other choice—a perfect example of the process of elimination. So perfect
an example, it makes me want to print it up in a pamphlet and hand it out to people on
the street. Hi, how are you? Check out the process of elimination
.
Tengo, always the nice young man. Mathematician and novelist. Judo champion
and teacher’s pet. Right now he’s the only way to unravel this knotty tangle. The more
I think about it, the less I seem to understand, like my brain is a tub of tofu past its
expiration date
.
So what about Tengo? Did he see the whole picture here? Probably not
. As far as
Ushikawa could make out, Tengo was doing things through trial and error,
taking
detours where he found the need.
He must be confused himself, trying out various
hypotheses. Still, he was a born mathematician. A master at fitting together the pieces
of a puzzle. And he probably has a lot more pieces of the puzzle than I do
.
For the time being I’ll keep watch over Tengo Kawana. I’m sure he’ll lead me
somewhere—
if I get lucky, right to Aomame’s hideout
. Ushikawa was a master at
sticking to somebody, like a remora to a shark. Once he made up his mind to latch
onto someone, there was no way they could shake free of him.
Once he had decided, Ushikawa closed his eyes and switched off his thinking
process.
Time to get a little shut-eye
, he thought. It had been
a rough day, given that
he had had to visit two elementary schools out in crummy old Chiba Prefecture and
listen to two female schoolteachers, a beautiful vice principal and a teacher who
walked like a crab. After that you need to relax. Soon his huge misshapen head began
to bob up and down in time to the
movement of the train, like a life-sized sideshow
doll that spat out unlucky fortunes.
The train was crowded, but no one dared sit down beside him.