JON CLEARY

The Phoenix Tree

Dedication

To Judith and Arthur Morris

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author's Note

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

1

Kenji Minato’s escape from the San Diego naval base did not go according to plan.

‘We shall have to arrange your escape,’ Commander Embury had said. ‘It has to look genuine. You’ve got to land back in Japan without any chance of them thinking you’ve been planted. You make for the Mexican border and get out of the States, that’s your first priority. As you know, there’s no Japanese embassy in Mexico City – the Mexicans are theoretically at war with the Japanese.’

‘The best way to be at war,’ Tom Okada had said. Though he was the American he had been far less cooperative than Minato. But then, Minato remembered, Tom had always been a rebel, even at high school.

‘That’s enough, corporal,’ Embury had said, not even glancing at Okada. I’m the important one here, Minato had thought, the real hero; and Tom doesn’t like it. ‘Lieutenant, there are Japanese and German businessmen down in Mexico who haven’t been interned. We know they are part of the Japanese spy network – I’m sure you have contacts there.’

Minato nodded. ‘And I’m sure you know who they are, Commander.’

Embury nodded in return. ‘We do, but they don’t worry us. You will have to persuade them to move you along their line back to Japan. It’ll probably be down to an embassy in South America, one of the smaller countries. From there it will probably be by ship to Lisbon; then by plane the rest of the way, through Occupied Europe to Turkey. We’re not sure what route the Japanese or Germans use from there on, but they do move personnel between themselves. It’s a long way home, but there’s no other way – it has to look as if you made it without any help from us. We’ll allow six to eight weeks, but that will depend on how quickly you’re moved along the line. We’ll give you names of contacts in Mexico City and other possible stopovers, so that you can keep us informed of when you’re being moved on. As for you, Corporal Okada—’

Okada sat up.

‘You’ll be going in by a much more direct route. We’ll drop you by parachute. Or take you in by submarine. You have nothing to worry about.’

Okada, for the moment, had chosen to be more Japanese than American. He had looked inscrutable.

On 3 January, the night of the escape, all went well to begin with. At 10 p.m. Minato complained to the Shore Patrol guard on duty that he had a slight attack of diarrhoea and had to go to the head. In all the weeks he had been here at the Navy base he had given no trouble; he and his guards were on the friendliest of terms, though the guard detail still had no idea why he had been held here so long. The SP on duty that night had no reason to believe that this trip to the head was any different from all the other trips Minato had made. Nothing establishes a routine as much as certain natural functions.

The guard suspected nothing when Minato stopped to tie up a shoelace. He was all innocent curiosity when Minato said, ‘What’s going on over there?’ He turned his head and was facing away from Minato when the latter hit him with a karate chop across the side of the neck. He went down in slow motion, allowing the Japanese to catch him and lower him into the shadows beside the latrine block. Minato took the guard’s pistol and the scout’s knife that was clipped to the man’s belt; the knife was not general issue but had been a proud possession of Alvin Gellen, ex-Eagle Scout. Minato waited till he was certain he had not been observed by anyone still moving about on the base. Then, keeping to the shadows, he made his way to where he had been told the admiral’s car would be parked.

He found the car, got into the boot and closed the lid, though making sure it could not be locked. Twenty minutes later the car was driven out of the base. The admiral, whose wife was keeping the home fires burning in Norfolk, Virginia, spent several nights a week being warmed by the wife of a commander absent on duty in the Pacific; keeping their adultery in the service, neither the admiral nor the commander’s wife thought they were being too traitorous. The driver delivered the admiral to his rendezvous, then drove on to his own assignation with the wife of a yeoman first class who was also absent on duty in the Pacific. The celibate Minato removed himself from the boot after the driver had hurried off whistling ‘Pistol Packin’ Momma’, a lover’s serenade.

Minato had half an hour’s walk through the darkened streets before he came to the alley off Market Street where he had been told the getaway car would be parked. He did not know San Diego well; he had not been in the city since before Pearl Harbor; so he had asked for the car to be parked where it could easily be found. Several times during the walk he had to slip into doorways to avoid being recognized as a Japanese. He sardonically wondered if the spies in Europe, from either side, appreciated the camouflage of looking no different from the enemy.

The car was a black 1938 Pontiac with California plates; the keys were taped under the front right-hand wing. He was just opening the driver’s door when the escape plan went wrong. Embury and his fellow planners had, quite reasonably, not taken into account the perambulations of a half-drunken, off-duty SP mate third-class.

Clem Bateman was from a farm in Missouri, prone to seasickness and therefore confined to shore duty; but he was big and strong and he could wield a billy-stick with all the woundup efficiency of a corn thresher; he had broken more American heads than any Kraut or Jap ever had. He hated Japs, particularly because it seemed that he would never get the chance to fight any and he would go back home at the end of the war and have nothing to boast about to the folks in Pike’s Corner. But if Japs had to go on living, then he reckoned the guy he had been guarding for weeks, l’il ole Kenny Minato, was as good as any to be given the chance. He had come to think that l’il ole Kenny was a real nice guy.

He was taking a short cut through the alley, heading for a cathouse he had run aground on while on SP patrol, when he came on the Jap trying to open a car door. He was almost past him before he recognized that he was a Jap; he had taken two more stumbling paces before he recognized Minato. He turned round, fell against the car in his surprise.

‘Hey, Minato! What the hell you doing here?’

‘Nothing. I got a pass—’

‘The hell you did!’ He made a grab at Minato. ‘Lemme buy you a drink! When’d you last have a good drink, eh?’

Minato did not want to kill the big American, but he had always been swift in deciding his options. He flicked open the scout’s knife and stabbed Mate Third Class Bateman with it. He had a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy, but he knew that Americans were always boasting they were all heart and he took them at their word and stabbed in the general direction. Bateman died instantly, the best way to go, and had no time to be disappointed in the real nice guy.

The big farmer’s boy slid down on to the front fender, lay there for a moment as if deciding whether he should go further, then slumped to the ground. Minato looked down at him dispassionately. The war was three years old and up till now he had killed no one; he was surprised at how little he was affected by the American’s death. He had never expected to have to kill and now he had done it without compunction, as if it were part of his nature. There is a certain satisfaction in self-discovery, especially if you feel in command of what one has learned. Minato had no ambition to go on killing, but he knew that if he had to do it again he would kill without qualms.

He stepped over the body into the car, started up the engine and drove down the alley and into Market Street. He drove east out through Encanto and soon was in the desert, keeping his speed steady so that he would not attract the attention of a cruising police car. There was more traffic on Route 8 than he had expected at this time of night; then he realized it was mostly military traffic. But he took no notice of it; he was finished with spying here in the United States.

It came as something of a shock that he was finished in the United States, period. He had been here six years, at liberty more than half that time, and there had been times when he had felt himself becoming Americanized, a disease he had tried to avoid. But he knew how infectious America was; one could come to believe that all its propaganda was the reality. There was no discipline to the country, of course, but even that had begun to have its appeal; its vaunted democracy was riddled with holes, a political Swiss cheese, but it meant that anyone could rise to the top, something that was not possible in the Japan he had left six years ago. America had much to offer; it was a pity it could not be conquered.

Well out in the desert he at last turned south after checking the map that had been left for him in the glove box. He drove the Pontiac along a dirt road that wound between bare hillocks that looked like white buttocks in the bright moonlight. He had switched off the headlights and drove carefully along the twisting track. He stopped for a moment, switched on the car’s interior light and looked again at the map; then he drove on, certain that he was on the right route to the weakest spot in the long surveillance by the Border Patrol. He drove for another ten minutes, then switched off the engine and let the car roll to a halt. He sat listening for a full minute; then he got quietly out of the car and listened again. He could hear a night bird of some sort; it had an unmusical cry, like a short cough of despair. He remembered from his time in the camp in Arizona how sound carried in the desert at night; the highway had to be at least five or six miles north of him, yet he could still hear the moan of trucks as they changed gears to climb a rise. But he heard no sound of motors close to him. Unless the Border Patrol was lying somewhere amongst the greasewood and cactus, he was safe.

He went to the boot of the car and took out the cheap suitcase he knew would be mere; he had come to have a great deal of faith in Commander Embury. The suitcase contained a blue work-shirt, a pair of coveralls, work-boots and a woollen lumber jacket, all of them faded and worn; just the sort of outfit a farm worker would wear. He changed out of the Navy tans, then looked at what remained in the suitcase. Five hundred dollars in US bills and Mexican pesos, more than enough to get him to Mexico City and the contact there. He had always thought that Americans were far too generous with the taxpayers’ money.

He headed south, leaving the track, which now swung east, and trudged along a dry watercourse. Occasionally he pulled up sharply as yucca trees or, once, a small Joshua tree took on the shape of a man in the moonlight; but no harsh voice hailed him, no light was flashed on him, and after a moment he would move on. Low cactus caught at his trouser-legs and once he jumped in the air as a jack-rabbit suddenly erupted almost beneath him. The watercourse began to drop, then he heard the trickle of water and soon he was walking through tule weeds besides a thin creek that reflected the moonlight like shards of polished shale.

Then the creek ran out, seeming to disappear into the ground. He came to a deep arroyo, slid down its bank and fell over the sleeping figure at the bottom.

He rolled aside, dropping his suitcase and grabbing at his pocket for the scout’s knife. But there was no call to use it. The man he had fallen over sat up, grumbling at being disturbed; even in the moonlight it was possible to see, or anyway smell, that he was drunk, or had been. Two bottles lay near him on the pale sand and he smelled as if he had just climbed out of a wine vat. He was no danger to anyone but himself.

Minato stood up, then dropped down again with a sharp cry. His ankle felt as if it had been hit with an axe. Gingerly he moved his foot, wincing against the pain; he decided the ankle wasn’t broken but sprained enough to make him a half-cripple. He looked at the man and wanted to kill him.

‘Howdy,’ said the man, and hiccupped. ‘Who’re you?’

‘What the hell are you doing out here, you bum?’ Minato tried to sound as American as he could.

‘I live here. You new around here?’ The man leaned forward, putting his breath on Minato like a dirty hand. ‘Goddam, a fucking Jap!’

Minato was ready to kill him if he raised some sort of alarm, but the man just shook his head, almost dislodging the tall-crowned black hat he wore. Then Minato said, ‘I’m Nisei, not Japanese. A Jap American, if you like.’

The man giggled, took off his hat and revealed the thick dark plaits hanging down by his ears. ‘Only one sort Americans, buddy. Us. You ask General fucking Custer.’

Minato stared at the Indian, then looked around him, half-expecting to be surrounded. The man hiccupped and reached for one of the bottles. But it was empty, as was the second bottle; he threw them away with a curse. He sat in the sand of the arroyo bed, his shoulders slumped, looking ready to weep. But he and his sort had given up weeping years before: the struggle was long lost.

At last he looked up. ‘You didn’t oughta be here. White guys ain’t allowed on the reservation. Yeller guys, neither. We’re the last of the Apaches, western division.’ He giggled again. ‘The gov’ment tried to educate me once. They wanted an Apache bur’crat.’

‘Reservation?’ Embury hadn’t mentioned any Indian reservation. Then Minato realized he must have taken the wrong turning off Route 8; he still had to go three-quarters of the way round the world and already he was lost. He cursed himself in Japanese, then reverted to English. ‘A bureaucrat? You help run the reservation?’

The Indian laughed, more than just a giggle this time; as if with no drink left, he had decided to sober up. ‘I lasted a week. They said I liked the fire-water too much. They was right, I do like it. Tequila, wine, whiskey, makes no difference. Where you heading?’ he said abruptly, sounding very sober.

‘Across the border.’ Minato had begun to recognize a fellow enemy of the American government.

‘What for?’

‘I’m tired of being pushed around. You look different in this country, they want to knock the shit out of you.’ He was trying to sound like some of the Nisei, the Japanese-American farm workers he had known in the camps.

‘Didn’t they intern all you guys?’ The Indian was sounding more sober by the minute; and more intelligent.

‘I spent two years in a camp over in Arizona. Then they let me out, guess they thought I could be trusted. I been working on a farm up in Utah.’

‘Where you going when you get across the border?’

‘I dunno. South America, maybe. They’re not so fussy down there – what you look like, I mean.’ It offended him to be talking like this, to have to act out this charade.

‘Yeah.’ The Indian nodded sympathetically. He was dressed in a dark shirt and coveralls and had an Indian blanket wrapped round his shoulders; but for the blanket and his plaits, he could have passed almost unnoticed in any American street crowd. But he was on the inside looking out of himself, the recognition of difference was in his own eyes. Then abruptly he sat up straight. ‘Truck’s coming!’

For a moment Minato heard nothing; then he caught the sound of a motor somewhere to the east. ‘What is it?’

‘The Patrol. They come along here every night. Dunno what they’re looking for. Japs or Indians going out or Mex’s coming in.’ He laughed softly; he was no longer giggling. ‘I’ll take you to the border. How much?’

‘Five dollars?’

‘Five bucks? You a fucking Jewish Jap?’ He had his prejudices; he didn’t lump all white Americans together. ‘Ten.’

‘Okay, ten.’ Minato stood up, listening to the truck getting closer. He put his injured foot to the ground and gasped with pain. ‘You’ll have to help me.’

‘Another five bucks.’ The Indian grinned in the moonlight. ‘We give up taking beads. It’s a cash economy.’

He offered his arm to Minato and the latter leaned on it. They set off along the arroyo, Minato hobbling painfully, the Indian slouching along; arm in arm they looked like old friends, or lovers, who had lost their way after a night out. To the east of them they could hear the grinding of the truck in low gear, as if it was ploughing its way towards them from the far end of the arroyo.

The Indian abruptly turned right, throwing Minato off-balance; the Japanese cried out with pain and the Indian gruffly muttered an apology. Minato clung to him as they stumbled up the bank of the arroyo. Like all Japanese he had always been meticulous in his bodily cleanliness and he was sickened by the smell of the Indian; but he had no other staff to lean on. They struggled up to the top of the bank and the Indian paused.

‘There they are.’ He spoke casually, as if he had been scouting for the enemy for over a century. Carleton, Sibley, Custer, the forces of the white man’s law and order, were marked on the horizons of his mind.

Minato saw the slowly bouncing beam of the headlights some distance away: maybe five hundred yards, maybe more. He was short-sighted, a handicap for a spy, and at night he had no idea of distance. He just knew that the Border Patrol truck, probably a pick-up, was too close for comfort.

‘Lay down,’ said the Indian. ‘You ain’t gonna be able to run with that ankle.’

He pushed Minato to the ground, then walked off without another word, straight towards the approaching truck. Minato lay flat to the ground and watched the Indian through a spiky hedge of low cactus. The Indian stopped about fifty yards away and stood waiting on the top of the bank. The truck continued to approach, its headlights beam moving from side to side like a blind giant’s white stick as it twisted its way along the arroyo. Then it pulled up immediately beneath the Indian.

The engine was switched off and a voice said, ‘That you, Jerry? You out here again, drunk again?’

The Indian was silhouetted against the glare of the headlights beneath him; in his tall hat and with his blanket wrapped round him he all at once had a dignity about him, a dark monument. ‘Just clearing my head, Mr Porter. I been celebrating Geronimo’s birthday.’

Minato could imagine the Indian chuckling to himself. But he lay waiting for the Indian to give him away: in a cash economy, the reward for capturing an escaped Japanese prisoner must be more than five or ten dollars. Then Minato remembered he was supposed to be a Nisei; maybe the Indian knew that a Nisei was worth nothing.

The man down in the arroyo laughed without humour. ‘You seen anyone around here while you been clearing your head?’

‘Ain’t no one here but us Indians, Mr Porter.’ Again Minato could imagine the quiet chuckle. He began to feel easier, safe.

The Border Patrol man said something that Minato didn’t catch; then the engine was started up again and the truck drove slowly on along the arroyo. The Indian watched it go, raising his hand in a mock salute of peace. Then he came unhurriedly back to Minato as the latter got awkwardly to his feet.

‘You gonna be okay now. We got about a mile to go.’

Minato looked steadily at him. ‘Why is a guy like you still here on the reservation? There are plenty of Indians like you in the army.’

‘The army don’t want no drunk. Anyhow, they know I’m still fighting with the Chiricahuas. They think I’m crazy, a crazy drunk.’ He laughed, not crazily but intelligently. ‘What army wants a crazy drunken brave?’

Minato didn’t know who the Chiricahuas were but he guessed they were warriors of long ago: maybe Indian samurai? He took the other man’s arm again and they moved on. It was another half-hour, with Minato hobbling painfully, now clinging to the stinking Indian as if he loved him, before the Indian abruptly said, ‘Okay, this is it. You’re in Mexico.’

Minato sank down in the dust and looked up at him. ‘Don’t joke, I’m not in the mood for it.’ He had forgotten that he was supposed to be a farm worker; the rough accent was gone. ‘We should have come through a wire fence or something.’

‘There’s no fence, not around here, anyway. We’ve just crossed into Mexico, you take my word for it. Fifteen bucks.’ He held out his hand.

Minato felt in the suitcase, took out the roll of notes and peeled off three fives. ‘You’re not going to leave me ’way out here? I’ll give you another five to take me to the nearest road.’

The Indian put the bills in his pocket. ‘This is as far as I go. You wanna be careful with that money. I could of took it off of you. You know what they used to say – never trust an Injun.’

‘I’d kill you if you tried.’ Minato stood up, awkwardly but quickly. The scout’s knife was open in his hand, its blade a pale glint in the moonlight.

The Indian didn’t back off. His right hand came out from under his blanket; it held a knife, one with a longer blade than Minato’s. ‘Don’t try it, Jap. How many guys you killed with that potato-peeler?’

One: but what was that to boast about? Minato picked up his suitcase and backed away, on edge for the first hint that the Indian was about to plunge towards him. But the Indian didn’t move; instead, he grinned and put his knife back under his blanket. He looked steadily at Minato, then he turned on his heel and walked slowly back into the moon-softened darkness, like a ghost retreating into the past.

Then his voice came floating back, as clear on the desert silence as if he were only a few yards away: ‘You can’t win, Jap. You’re like us – the war’s lost!’

Minato sat down suddenly in the dust; it was his spirit, not his ankle, that buckled. For six months, ever since he’d been picked up, he’d fooled the Americans. Slowly he had let them think they had turned him round, converted him into a double-agent, a traitor to Japan. It had not been easy to fool them; the Americans had a pathological suspicion of all Japanese, even the US-born ones like Tom Okada. But subtly, he thought, he had hinted at his six years’ conversion to American thinking and institutions; but all the while he had remained as Japanese as ever. He was intelligent and objective enough to know that Japan was losing the war; but he wanted to go home to die in Japan, not live on, or at worst die, in America. And now it seemed that the long wait might end here in the Mexican desert.

He had twenty thousand miles to go, more than halfway round the world, and suddenly he wondered if it would all be worthwhile. Abruptly he began to giggle, almost drunkenly, sounding just like the Indian had when he had first stumbled on him. He was thinking of Tom Okada, the American, waiting for him in Japan and his own bleached bones lying here in the mean shade of a Joshua tree.

The joke was that Okada’s code name was Joshua.

2

On St Valentine’s Day Tom Okada hung in midair at midnight above the middle of Honshu. He had never felt so utterly alone; it was as if the whole universe were a vacuum and he, alive only on the air still in his lungs, were the only living thing in it. Already the sound of the aircraft that had dropped him had faded and above him the stars were dead white eyes that offered him no sympathy. Below him Japan was just a black hole hidden by cloud cover.

The feeling of being alone, at first not recognized, had begun as soon as Ken Minato had been allowed to escape; from then on Okada had realized there was no turning back, at least if shame was to be avoided. He had been surprised to find that he had a shame complex; that was a Japanese trait.

He had been sent to Corpus Christi Naval Air Base in Texas for, as Commander Embury sardonically described it, a crash course in parachuting. The instructors there had not been told why a Jap should be instructed in jumping; some of them had questioned Okada, but he, acting inscrutable, had told them he didn’t know. They hadn’t been inscrutable in showing their annoyance at this smiling, uppity Jap. He had made three jumps and been passed as satisfactory, though he himself felt far from satisfied with the situation.

He drifted down through the darkness, the air whispering along the cords of the parachute. He had little idea of what lay below him other than that it was mountainous country; there was the danger that he might land on the edge of a cliff, but it had been decided (by Embury and the others; he had been given no vote) that the danger would be greater if he landed in flat country where there would be villages or even troop concentrations. He began to sweat, wondering if he would be dead in the next few seconds.

‘You’re going to need luck,’ Embury had said. ‘But if you land safely, it should be a good omen for the rest of the mission. Do you believe in omens?’

‘No,’ said Okada, lying; lately he had begun to see everything as an omen, even a passing cloud.

Embury and Lieutenant Irvine had accompanied him to Saipan. Irvine had been of considerable help in assisting him to take on the character of a Saipan Japanese civilian. Okada had had to adjust his accent once again; thoroughly exposed to it now amongst the prisoners still held on the island, he had found the Saipan civilians, the ones who had spent their life there, had a much coarser accent. Since he could not imitate it perfectly it was decided that, in the persona that was gradually being painted on him, he would have spent three years in Japan with his grandparents, folk who were now conveniently dead. He learned to say certain words and phrases the way the Saipanese did, the hint of local colour in the emerging portrait of Tamezo Okada, sawmill under-manager. It had been decided that he should keep his own name, the risk being taken that there were no records in Tokyo of all the civilians on Saipan. It comforted him to hold on to his name – an omen, if you liked.

‘The thing to remember,’ said Irvine, ‘is that in a country as battered as Japan there is more confusion than suspicion. America is at war, but it isn’t in the war – so forget all about how you felt at home. You’ll be more at home in Japan—’ He smiled as Okada looked at him quizzically. ‘Well, you’ll be less conspicuous, shall we say?’

But Okada had wondered if he would ever be at home in his father’s homeland; he had certainly not been when he had been taken there as a child to stay with his grandparents. As a boy he had not come to terms with the Japanese mentality and now as a man he still felt uncomfortable with it.

Okada had been attached to a Marine battalion that had landed with the first invasion wave on the island of Saipan in the Marianas eight months ago. Like everyone else in the battalion he had been surprised at how, since World War I, the Japanese had colonized and developed the island. Besides the 30,000 soldiers on the island there were 25,000 civilians working in the sawmills, the sugar-cane fields and other light industries. Few military prisoners had been taken, but civilians had been captured in their hundreds and Okada had been kept busy as an interpreter. Then his battalion had been moved on, to the north of the island, picking their way through the countless, stinking corpses of the soldiers who had died for the Emperor in suicide attacks or by their own hand. Then, on the very northernmost tip of the island, he and the Marines had stood sickened and powerless as they had watched over 10,000 Japanese civilians take their own lives and those of their children. Babies had been smashed against rocks, women and older children had been thrown from the high cliffs, men had hurled themselves, with long-drawn-out cries that would scar the aural memory of those who witnessed the scene; into the sea far below. The civilians had died because their Emperor had, at the last minute, promised them an equal place with soldiers in the after-life to which they all aspired. Hell was not for them, only for the Americans who saw them die.

‘Jesus!’ said the Marines and looked at Okada. ‘What gets into you guys?’

Two days later Okada had been called back to the prison camps where there were still civilians, sensible though damned, waiting to be interrogated. Still haunted by what he had seen his father’s countrymen do, he had tried for an explanation from those who had declined to die; but the survivors were struck dumb by shame, not at what the suicides had done but that they themselves had not followed the Emperor’s call. He found himself in no man’s land, shunned by the Japanese he was making fumbling attempts to help, suspected by the Americans as being sympathetic to the mass suicides.

In October he went with the first wave of the invasion force on to the island of Leyte, in the Philippines. A week after the landing, when a deep beachhead had been established, he was called back from a forward unit and told to report to headquarters.

‘I got no idea what it’s all about, corporal. All the order says is that you’re being transferred. Permanently.’

He hadn’t liked the sound of that. ‘Can I protest, sir?’

‘Corporal, I understand you’ve been protesting ever since Pearl Harbor. You must be the bitchingest soldier that’s ever served in the US forces and I’d go back as far as the Revolutionary Army.’

Okada had smiled through his sweat. ‘Just proving I’m an American, sir.’

Okada had been put on a plane and two days later, via Honolulu, he was put down in California, his home state which he hadn’t seen in two long years.

‘Welcome to San Diego,’ said the Navy officer who looked as if he might have been starched inside his uniform. He was a good six inches taller than Okada, who was five feet nine, and he had a long nose that he appeared to use as a range-finder when looking down at men on a lower level of height and rank. ‘I’m Lieutenant-Commander Reilly.’

Okada saluted, a sloppy effort due more to exhaustion than disrespect. ‘I hope you can tell me why I’m here, sir. The Navy?’ He looked around the base, as spick-and-span as an admiral’s ribbons. This was the clean end of the war, the best end. ‘Is there some son of services merger going on?’

‘God forbid,’ said Reilly. ‘Follow me.’

Okada, lugging his kitbag, followed the Navy officer across to a low building set aside from the main administration offices. He was conscious of being stared at by passing Navy personnel and he could read the question in their faces: who’s the Jap bum, some prisoner they’ve brought back from the SWPA? Serves me right for looking like a bum, he thought. But then he hadn’t expected to be dumped here in this naval base where even the lawns looked as if they were shaved daily.

Reilly led him into a room that, though spartan, was still far more comfortable than anything he had seen in the past two years. FDR smiled a toothy welcome to him from a photograph on the wall, but Okada ignored it. The President was not to know that he was no longer one of Okada’s heroes.

‘Sir, is this the usual accommodation for enlisted personnel in the Navy?’

‘No, corporal, it’s not. It’s usually reserved for visiting officers – certain officers, that is. You will not leave it at any time, unless accompanied by a guard.’ Reilly nodded at the mate second class of shore police who stood outside the door, all self-importance, muscle and gaiters. Okada hated police of any sort, service or civilian. ‘You hear that, mate? If he wants to go to the head or the showers, someone goes with him every time. And he is not to communicate with anyone. Anyone, you understand?’

‘Jesus!’ said Okada.

Reilly looked at him. ‘Are you a Christian?’

‘Would it help?’ Then he saw that Reilly had little sense of humour. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Reilly gave him a look that, two years ago, Okada would have considered racist; but he no longer cared about such things. Not today, anyway; he was too exhausted. Reilly went away and Okada, letting his clothes lie where they fell, a most unnaval custom, went to bed and slept for twelve hours. If the war was over for him, he could have cared less.

Next morning, fed, shaved, showered and dressed in new tan drill, he presented himself, escorted by the SP detail, to Lieutenant-Commander Reilly. With the latter were two other officers, one American, the other British.

‘Commander Embury. Lieutenant-Commander Irvine. You may sit down, corporal. For the moment there will be no formality.’ It seemed to hurt Reilly to say it; his starch creaked as he tried to relax. ‘Commander Embury will now take over.’

Embury was USN, but a reserve officer; the starch in him had never taken, or had been watered down. He had had a successful Oldsmobile dealership in Falmouth on Cape Cod; perhaps the Navy powers-that-be had decided that an auto salesman’s shrewdness would be an asset in Intelligence. Not that he had a slick salesman’s look, as if he’d only sold solid farm machinery. He was untidy, squat and ungainly, suggesting that he was shambling even when sitting down. He smoked a pipe that looked as if it might have been taken from one of the Indians who had greeted the Pilgrims and the tobacco he used smelled as if it were dried peat from the cranberry bogs on Cape Cod. Everything about him said he was a misfit, till one looked at his eyes. Okada had never seen such a coldly intelligent gaze.

Embury wasted no time: ‘You speak Japanese fluently?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Read and write it?’

‘Yes, sir. My father insisted that my sisters and I learn it. And I lived in Japan for two years with my grandparents.’

‘We know that, corporal.’

‘I thought you might, sir.’ Okada was suddenly wary. ‘Why am I here, sir?’

‘You’ve worked with Detachment 101, of the OSS?’

‘Just the once, sir, my first action. They were short of an interpreter and I was sent to Burma. I didn’t volunteer, sir.’

Embury’s gaze suddenly softened as he smiled. ‘You didn’t like it?’

‘We were behind the enemy’s lines for the whole of that month, just me and two other guys.’

‘I thought Merrill’s Marauders often worked behind Jap lines? Sorry, Japanese lines.’

Okada ignored the slip, wondering if it was deliberate. ‘They did, sir. But usually in platoon strength, at least. It was pretty goddam lonely, just with those two OSS guys.’

‘You may yet feel even more lonely.’ But Embury didn’t elaborate. Instead, he relit his pipe and went on: ‘You have been under observation for quite some time, corporal. Not by us, but by Army Intelligence and before them the FBI. It was not your own record that caused suspicion, but your father’s. As an anti-American Issei, he hasn’t been trusted.’

Okada well knew that many of the Japan-born, the Issei, were strongly pro-American; but his father had never been, not even in the comfortable days before Pearl Harbor. He could not, however, leave his father undefended; to that extent, at least, he himself was Japanese. ‘I don’t think he’d go in for sabotage or anything like that, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Well, he is still under surveillance. Knowing the respect you Japanese, even the Nisei, the American-born ones, have for your elders—’ Embury stopped for a moment to relight his pipe. The father of three bandit brats, he sighed inwardly for what the Orientals had achieved in family life. Then he went on: ‘We couldn’t be sure what influence he might have had on you. But your record with the Military Language School in Minnesota and then in the field with the Marauders and again with the Marines in the Pacific theatre – well, it showed you were prepared to prove you were at least one hundred per cent American.’

‘At least that, sir.’ Okada did not feel at ease, but he was not going to be humbly submissive to the Navy, USN or otherwise. He glanced at Lieutenant-Commander Irvine, RN, who surprised him by giving him a quiet smile. He wondered what the Englishman was doing here so far from any theatre where the British were operating, but he did his best to hide his curiosity. While these three men were going to play the game close to their chests, he’d do the same.

Embury stood up and lumbered across to a narrow window, the only one, in the side wall of the office. Okada had noticed when he had come in that the room looked more like an interrogation cell than an office; there were no filing cabinets, just bare walls and a table and four chairs. Neither Embury nor the other two officers had offered any explanation of the room.

‘This is a one-way window. We can see out, but those on the other side can only see a mirror. Take a look, corporal. Recognize anyone out there?’

Okada got up and moved to the window, curious and puzzled. All his life, being a Nisei, there had been times when he had felt off-balance; the supposed melting-pot that was America had thrown out Orientals like himself as non-absorbable. He was off-balance now, but not for racial reasons, and he felt cautious and, yes, a little afraid. He was being set up for something and he could only guess at what it might be. He fully expected to see his father sitting in the next room.

He looked through the window into a room as bare as the one in which he stood. One man, a Caucasian in Navy tans, sat at a table. The other, a Japanese in a checked shirt and grey flannel trousers, stood with his back against a wall, saying something to the Navy officer that was obviously defiant.

‘Do you recognize the Japanese?’ said Embury.

‘He looks familiar, sort of.’ Okada stared at the man in the next room; then he felt a stiffening of shock. ‘It’s Ken Minato!’

‘Exactly. How long is it since you’ve seen him?’

‘I don’t know – six or seven years, I guess.’ Okada looked in at the man who, when they were boys, had been his closest friend. But the friend was only dimly seen, as in a photograph that had been retouched and not for the better. A friendship soured does nothing for the objective view. ‘It was in Japan, when I last went home with my father. 1937. He was in the Japanese Navy then. What’s he doing here?’

‘We’ll come to that in a moment,’ said Embury, dropping back to his game plan. But he did come out from behind the smokescreen of his pipe, leaning his head almost comically to one side. ‘Corporal, we’d like to send you back to Japan with Lieutenant Minato.’

‘When?’ Okada retreated behind his own smokescreen; Americans were always joking about Oriental inscrutability.

‘Within the next three months.’

Okada forgot all about being inscrutable; he let out a cough of laughter. ‘Commander, what sort of crap am I being fed? Did you bring me all the way from Saipan for something crazy like this?’

Embury looked at Reilly, who said, ‘I told you he had a reputation for speaking his mind. It’s all in his file.’

‘No bad thing,’ said Embury, and Reilly looked pained: Annapolis had never taught such heresy. That, of course, was a major problem of a war; one had to draw on the amateurs.

‘Yes, corporal, we did bring you all this way for exactly that. We think the idea is worth exploring. All we have to do is convince you.’

‘Fat chance.’ Okada was openly rebellious now, American all the way. ‘I’d like to be sent back to my outfit, sir. As far away from here as possible.’

‘Sit down, corporal.’ Embury resumed his own seat and after a moment Okada dropped into his chair. He eyed all three men like a trapped animal and he had the feeling that they were looking at him as animal trainers might have done. Clyde Beatty and his Japanese performing wild dog … Embury puffed on his pipe, which had now begun to look like a stage prop. ‘Let me tell you about the man in the next room. You know some of it, but not all of it. He was born in Japan and brought here when he was a year old. He went back to Japan in 1929, the year of your first visit – he was men 13 years old. Unlike you, he stayed on – he liked the Japanese way of life. You didn’t, we understand.’

‘I hated it.’

‘Well, Minato stayed on. He went to Echijima, the Naval Academy, then was posted to Naval Intelligence. He became a junior protégé of Admiral Tajiri, who was a senior member of the Navy General Staff. Minato’s parents, his only relatives, were both killed in General Doolittle’s air raid on Tokyo in March 1942.’

‘My father would be upset to hear that. He was a close friend of Old Man Minato. Where did you take Ken prisoner?’

‘Right here in the United States, at the Military Language School where you went. He’s never been in action, except as a spy.’

Okada frowned. ‘I find that hard to believe …’

The three officers waited for him to explain himself. Reilly fidgetted, but Embury and Irvine showed Oriental patience.

At last Okada said, ‘Ken was a good guy, my best friend in junior high school. We fell out later, when I saw him on my second visit to Japan, that was in 1937, but it wasn’t really serious. He just sounded like a younger version of his father. And my father too, I guess,’ he added, and regretted at once that he had done so. He was still batting for his father, though the Old Man didn’t deserve it.

‘We understand the division between you and your father is very serious.’

‘That came later,’ said Okada abruptly. ‘What about Minato?’

‘He’s been here in this country since March 1938. He came back here under the name Suzuki and enrolled as a student at Gonzaga University at Spokane in Washington State. He said he was a Catholic convert and they accepted him as such.’

‘Why up there? Why didn’t he come back to California?’

‘We assume he didn’t want to be recognized by you or any of the other Japanese he had gone to school with. Anyhow, within three months he had disappeared. He took on another identity, several in fact, and he’s been here ever since. He’s told us that he sent back to Tokyo enough information for the Japanese General Staff to know exactly the lay-out of all our West Coast shipyards, from Seattle down to here, San Diego, their capacity and our state of preparedness. Like the rest of you Japanese he was picked up at the time of the relocation order in February 1942 and he spent twelve months in a camp in Arizona. Then he volunteered for the Language School and was accepted – his idea, he’s told us, was to get sent to the Pacific theatre as an interpreter. He’d pick up more information there and then at the first opportunity he’d sneak back through the Japanese lines. He made one mistake – he tried to tell his contacts here in the States what he intended doing and we intercepted the message. Or rather, Army Intelligence did. He’s now volunteered to be turned around, as we say – to be sent back to Japan and spy for us. But we don’t trust him, not entirely. In Intelligence we tend not to trust anyone. Though, of course, at me beginning of any game, that’s all we can go on – trust. Right, gentlemen?’

The two gentlemen nodded, though Okada noticed that the Englishman smiled slightly, as if he thought trust were some sort of mild joke.

‘You said you want me to go back to Japan. With Minato? Why would you trust me?’

‘Why, indeed?’ said Embury and relit his pipe once again. Okada was becoming irritated by the routine, then he wondered if it was some sort of punctuation to keep him off-balance. Neither Reilly nor Irvine seemed impatient with Embury’s stop-go approach. ‘We’ll have to learn more about you, corporal, about your mental attitude. If you don’t come up to scratch …’

Okada saw a small red light winking at him out of the future. ‘If I don’t come up to scratch, what happens to me? Am I going to be sent back to my outfit?’

Embury shook his head. ‘No, we probably wouldn’t let you go. We may have to keep you in protective custody for the rest of the war. In better conditions than those relocation camps you were sent to, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Okada sat up straighter. His athlete’s body felt bruised, but it was really only his mind that was so. But this was still preferable to standing on the cliffs of Saipan, where his mind had almost suffered a knock-out blow. ‘Go on, sir.’

‘You’re interested?’

‘I’m interested, but that doesn’t mean I’m volunteering for anything. If I’m going to be kept in protective custody for the rest of the war, you’ve got nothing to lose by telling me more. You’ll have to tell me, if you want me to cooperate.’

Embury looked at Irvine. ‘Do you have guys like this in the British services?’

‘Occasionally. We exile them to the colonies or we send them out on commando raids and they become dead heroes.’ Irvine smiled at Okada, like an angler who always landed something from troubled waters.

‘I’ve heard of the British sense of humour, sir.’

‘It helps us muddle through,’ said Irvine, using a phrase that had become a British battle cry. Then he stopped smiling. ‘I wish you would help us in this little venture, corporal. It could mean a great deal to both our countries, America and Britain.’

For some reason he couldn’t fathom at the moment, Okada was suddenly receptive. Perhaps it was the friendliness in Irvine’s manner; the Englishman, of course, had no authority to be as demanding as Embury or Reilly. But it was obvious that, for some reason or other, Irvine had a personal interest in the matter. He did not have the bored, indifferent look of a liaison officer.

Okada looked back at Embury. ‘Tell me more, sir.’

Embury studied him for a moment through the smoke of his pipe. ‘Okay, corporal. But the more I tell you, the more you’re committed to going along with us … Admiral Tajiri was a leading member of the Strike-South faction in pre-war Japan. There were two factions – the Strike-South, the minority one, which had its eye on Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies, and the Strike-North faction, which thought it should prepare for an all-out war against communist Russia. Eventually the Strike-South lot won out. Admiral Tajiri knew the chances were high that America would come into the war if Japan struck south. So he set about preparing a spy ring. Minato was one of the first sent over here.’

‘Have you picked up any of the others?’

‘Several. They’re all held in Federal prisons. None of them volunteered to be turned around. But Minato now loves our way of life, he’s all for Mom and American apple pie and he thinks American democracy is the greatest system ever invented.’

‘Really?’ said Lieutenant-Commander Irvine, RN. Democracy was like original sin, anyone could lay claim to it.

Embury grinned at him, exposing teeth that looked as if they had been worn down by his pipe. ‘I was quoting our friend next door, David. No offence … The trouble is, corporal, we think Minato’s new-found love of America is just a bit too convenient. But we do believe that if we can smuggle him back to Tokyo, the risk is worthwhile. He may turn out to be very useful.’

‘What if he feeds you false information? How will you know the difference?’

Embury nodded approvingly. ‘You’re sharp, corporal. You’re right in step all the way, aren’t you?’

‘Let me say something, commander. I grew up in this country as a virtual outsider, no matter how much I loved Mom and apple pie and the American flag. You might almost say I was like a Jew in Nazi Germany. I had to be sharp to stay in step. You got no idea the number of times I stumbled, especially as a kid, and fell out of line. It was a question of survival – being sharp, I mean.’

Embury, Irvine and even Reilly looked suddenly sympathetic; as if, up till now, they had looked only in Caucasian mirrors. Reilly also looked disconcerted, as if he had not realized there had been another, earlier war going on.

‘It’ll be a question of survival in Japan,’ said Embury. ‘We won’t try to hide that from you. You’ll be our filter. Minato will give the information to you as his control and you’ll assess it before passing it on. We hope to teach you how to assess that information before we send you off. Our main hope is that when we get Minato back into Japan, he’ll go into Naval Intelligence on the staff of Admiral Tajiri. After six years in the field they’re not going to waste his experience.’

‘There’s an awful lot of hope going on, sir. What hope do I have that I’ll come out of this alive?’

‘Oh, about fifty-fifty – we hope.’

Okada was surrounded by smiles. He felt suddenly angry; then he made himself relax. Getting angry with these men would get him nowhere; once again he was the outsider. Then his curiosity, if not yet his patriotism, began to get the better of him. There were drawbacks to having been trained as a lawyer; one enjoyed listening to argument.

‘After I’ve assessed the information, how do I get it back to you? It seems to me that could be pretty hopeless, too.’

‘David?’ Embury looked at Irvine.

Irvine stood up, as if now that he had been invited to speak he had to stretch himself. He was about height, goodlooking but balding, with dark, and darkly amused, eyes; come Armageddon, he would treat it as the final, inevitable joke and accept it. He had what Okada, from meeting British officers in Burma, had come to know was a public school accent. British public schools, that is; Gardena High had never turned out an accent like Irvine’s. He had the assurance of someone who would never feel an outsider, anywhere at all.

‘I was in Tokyo before the war, as a junior naval attaché with the British embassy. We set up certain people as agents – we were working with our Secret Service, MI6. One of the agents was a man named Cairns. He was an authority on Oriental art, a professor at Tokyo University. He was very devoted to the Japanese in general, but not to their militarism, though he never said anything about that. He was highly regarded and he had access to a lot of top people. He was very valuable to us. He stayed on in Japan after war broke out in 1939 and even after Pearl Harbor – and the Japanese never suspected that he was an agent.’

Okada noticed that Irvine had not once used the word spy: the word was agent. Like most Americans of his time Okada knew little or nothing about spies and how they worked; he could remember seeing a couple of Alfred Hitchcock movies about British spies, but only one featuring an American. That had been Above Suspicion, which he had seen almost a year ago at the Language School: Joan Crawford had been an amateur, just as he would be if he agreed to go ahead with what was being suggested. He began to suspect that Irvine was the real professional in the room, at least in the field of espionage. He might be Royal Navy, but he was not just a sailor.

‘Professor Cairns was interned. Not sent to a prison camp, but to a resort village about forty miles south of Tokyo. Friendly aliens, if they had the right connections, were kept in several places like that. Aliens who did not want to be repatriated to their home countries or had no homelands to go to. Professor Cairns stayed on, ostensibly because he thought of Japan as his home – which he did. But he was also intent on continuing to work as an agent. He died in Nayora in May last year. Since then his wife has carried on in his place.’

‘How? I mean how does she get in touch with you?’

‘Cairns had a short-wave wireless somewhere in the village or nearby. Once a month, on a different day each month, his widow reports to a joint wireless station we run with the US Signal Corps in the Aleutians.’

‘Why can’t Mrs Cairns be Minato’s – what did you call it? Control?’

‘Yes, control. Two reasons. One, we’re not entirely sure of Mrs Cairns. I met her in Tokyo, but she had only just married Professor Cairns and, as far as we know, she didn’t know then that he was acting for us. Since his death she hasn’t fed us any false information – again as far as we know. We have to go on trust there. If she is on our side, then we can’t risk giving her away – I mean if Minato should doublecross us. You will, in effect, be the control for both of them.’

Okada gave his cough of laughter again. ‘The meat in the sandwich, you mean.’

‘Possibly,’ said Irvine. ‘I don’t think any of us are trying to fool you about your chances.’

Okada had felt out of his depth ever since he had entered the room; he had tried to float with the current, but now he was being swirled around. ‘You’re lengthening the odds too much, sir. You haven’t offered me one safe factor in this whole set-up.’

Embury took over again. ‘That’s true, corporal. Do you know of any safe factors in a war such as we’re fighting now?’

‘Yes, sir. Being posted to a base like this.’

‘That’s enough!’ Reilly couldn’t contain himself, rank or no rank.

Embury waved his pipe placatingly. ‘It’s okay, Roger. Corporal Okada is entitled to his opinion. I’m sure he feels the same way about the President being safe in the White House. The war is fought from many places.’

You son-of-a-bitch, thought Okada. He sat silent, putting on the mask he had inherited from his ancestors. At that moment, though he did not know it, he looked more Japanese than he ever had in his life before.

Okada sat staring at the one-way window in the wall. He was seated too low to be able to see into the next room. But Kenji Minato did not immediately interest him; the man next door was like himself, just a puppet in the game these men were playing. At last he said, ‘I’d like to think about it. But first, one question. How did you pick me out for this – mission?’

‘Your friend next door suggested you.’

So the course had been set and now he was on the last downward spiral of it; or at least of the first leg. He drifted through the cloud cover, which made him suddenly feel even more isolated; he was trapped in a nightmare. Panic grabbed at him, then let go; he dropped below the cloud into clear dark air. Japan rushed up at him out of the darkness; his stomach tightened and acid gushed up through his gullet and into his mouth. He caught a swift glimpse of pine trees that seemed to be jumping up at him like black sharks; the pale grey face of a precipice; and a snow-covered road that ran along the edge of the precipice. He jerked frantically on the cords of the parachute as he had been taught; but he was too inexperienced. It was luck, rather than skilful manoeuvring, that saved him. He sailed in above the cliff-face, hit a tree on the far side of the road, swung in hard against the tree-trunk and hung there twenty feet above the ground.

He was winded from hitting the tree and he felt sick from the acid in his mouth. But the overwhelming feeling was one of relief: he was alive. It was a good start: from now on he would have to learn to live by the hour.

He dropped the suitcase he carried, then awkwardly freed himself from the harness. He was wearing a flying-suit and flying-boots; he felt as cumbersome as a crippled bear. Somehow he got a foothold on the trunk of the tree and clambered up its branches to cut loose the tangled parachute. It took him another ten minutes to get the ’chute to the ground; it kept getting caught in the lower branches as he dropped it. At last he had it on the ground, folding it up so that it would serve as a sleeping-bag. Winter is no season for parachuting into enemy territory; but, he wryly told himself, war’s calendar never waits for corporals. If he survived the war he hoped he might get retrospective promotion and back pay.

He dug a hole in the snow with a broken branch, wrapped himself in the ’chute and lay down. He took stock of himself: there was no point in taking stock of his surroundings, since he couldn’t see any more than thirty yards in any direction. Behind him were the trees and in front of him, across the road, was a dark abyss. Black night, with the stars hidden by cloud, makes a joke of maps.

There was no turning back now: that was the first thing that had to be accepted. Agents dropped into Europe always had, dangerous though it might be, a landline to safety, to Switzerland or Spain or Sweden; it was Irvine who had pointed out the comparison. If he had to run he had virtually nowhere to run to but to continue circling within Japan itself. Rebellious as he had been, he had never practised philosophical resignation; but he had to practise it now. He was here to stay, probably till the end of the war. He shut out the thought that his own death might come first.

Abruptly he was exhausted; the tension of the last few days and hours caught up with him. He shivered with nerves; then the tension slipped out of him as if faucets had been opened in him. He lay back on the frozen ground and fell asleep. He stirred during the night with the cold, but better that than nightmares.

When he woke the clouds had gone and the sun was shining. He lay for a moment, wondering if his body was still alive: from the neck down he felt as if he was inhabiting an iron frame. Then, as if it had been waiting for him to wake, the sun began to warm him; he looked up into it and accepted it as another omen. At last he sat up, feeling like an old man; then got painfully to his feet, walked a few stiff paces and relieved himself. At least, he thought, I can piss like a young man.

He opened suitcase. It contained a change of clothing, a faded blue kimono, a second pair of shoes, a cheap overcoat, and a battered cap: the wardrobe of a working man. There were also a thick wallet of yen notes, a package of sandwiches, a Japanese thermos of coffee, a map and a pair of Japanese binoculars he had picked up on Saipan. While he ate the sandwiches and drank the coffee, he studied the map, comparing its contours with what he could now see of the landscape.

The black abyss of last night on the other side of the road was now a valley; pine trees covered the upper half of the slopes like a green-black shawl, but the lower slopes were terraced. The snow-covered terraces were like giant steps of ice that caught the sun and flung it back up out of the valley in a white glare. A solitary peasant climbed like an ant up through the terraces; far below him stood two oxen, still as dark rocks. The valley was utterly silent and Okada, his mind straying for the moment, wondered where the war was.

When he had finished breakfast he took the parachute and the flying suit and boots further up into the timber. The ground was too hard to break, so he buried the ’chute, the flying gear and his map in the snow; by the time the snow melted he would be long gone and a long way away. Then he went back to the road, put on the overcoat and cap, hung the suitcase over his shoulder by a strap and set off down towards the valley floor. He had a rough idea where he now was, an hour or two’s walk from the railroad that would take him to Tokyo.

By the time he reached the railroad line, following it north along the road that ran beside it, he had come down into the floor of the valley. He had passed through several hamlets and two large villages and no one had stopped him or, in most cases, even glanced at him. His apprehension, which had begun to rise as he had approached the first hamlet, had subsided; the people he had passed took him for one of themselves, he looked no different except that he was a little taller than most of them. Then he was coming into a town, larger than any of the villages he had passed through, and he began to feel apprehensive again. Here there would be police and military personnel; already he had been passed on the road by a dozen or more military vehicles, trucks and cars. He looked for a good omen, but saw none, so settled for some forced optimism, an American trait he had never shown at home.

The town was a light industrial one; evidently not an important one, because he saw no evidence of bomb damage. He walked through the factory area on the outskirts, aware more of the soldiers he saw than of the factories and other buildings he passed. There had to be a major military camp around here, but Embury and Irvine had given him no intelligence on that: he had to find his own hurdles and negotiate them. They were not interested in what happened to him before he got to Tokyo, only that he should survive and reach the city.

He saw very few private trucks or cars and those that were in the town had gas-bags or tanks fitted to their roofs or on the boots. He could not tell whether the people looked well-fed or hungry; as he remembered them, most Japanese had never run to plumpness. Very few were smiling or even relaxed-looking, but he could not remember if they had looked like that in 1929 or even 1937: boys of thirteen and even young men of twenty-one were not sociologically-minded in those days. The world was to be enjoyed, not studied, and the passing parade was only something that impeded one on the way to a movie or a ball-game or a date with a girl. Still, the people in this town, and even the soldiers he passed, did not have the buoyancy he had seen amongst the Americans on the bases at San Diego and Corpus Christi.

He had no firm idea where the railroad station was, but he knew it must be somewhere on his right. He turned a corner and two soldiers stood in his path. They were both young and had that arrogance that a uniform gives to some men, young and old.

‘Where’s the railroad station?’ one of them demanded.

Each of them was shorter than Okada by at least five inches; they were twin dwarves of aggression, trying to intimidate him by horizontal merger. Though nervous, he wanted to laugh at them; but in Japan, the insult had less currency than in America. Especially so since this was enemy territory. He gestured down the street. ‘I think it’s down that way.’

‘You don’t know?’ One of them was the spokesman; the other, shorter one stood quiet. ‘You’re a civilian, you ought to know where your town’s railroad station is.’

Why don’t you hand me a white feather? Okada thought. ‘I’m a farm worker from out of town. Someone has to grow the food to feed you soldiers.’

His tone was curter than it should have been; he would have to learn more courtesy. The spokesman looked at his companion, then back at Okada. ‘You ought to have more respect for our uniform.’

Oh, come off it! Then again he realized he was not at home. ‘I apologize. I was not disrespectful of your uniform.’

He bowed his head and went to step past the two soldiers. But the shorter of the two, the quiet one, stepped in front of him. He was thin and wizened and had a soul to match; though he did not admit to a soul. He had also been drinking, an indulgence that had kept him quiet up till now. He came out of a fog of saké. ‘Someone as big and healthy as you should be wearing a uniform. Let the women and the old men work the farms.’

‘There are no old men on our farm and my mother is too sick to work in the fields. The authorities decided I should stay and work the farm.’

Okada Wanted to brush the two soldiers out of his way and escape towards the station. Passers-by were looking at them, though so far no crowd had gathered; Okada was grateful for Japanese politeness. Then he saw the two soldiers in helmets coining down the street, long sticks in their right hands; he could smell military police fifty yards away. He began to sweat and hoped it wasn’t showing on his face.

He decided there was nothing to do but attack: ‘Here come two military police. Perhaps you’d like to call them and have them arrest me? They’d appreciate a drunken soldier calling on them for help.’

The taller of the two soldiers looked over his shoulder, then grabbed his companion’s arm and hustled him down the street. The half-drunken soldier snapped an obscenity at Okada, but allowed himself to be led away. Okada looked after them, pleased at how his attack had worked; then he turned to walk on and found the two military police coming towards him. One of them held up his stick to bar Okada’s path.

‘Were those two soldiers annoying you?’ It was difficult to tell whether the man who had spoken, a corporal, was being courteous or sarcastic.

‘They were just asking the way, corporal,’ said Okada. ‘They were not annoying me, not at all.’

‘Where are you from? You have a different accent from the people around here.’

His own accent was middle class and Okada wondered if there was a different system for recruitment of Japanese military police. He decided now was as good a time as any to take the plunge. ‘I am from Saipan. I escaped from there in September.’

‘You ran away?’ The corporal was as tall as Okada, met him eye to eye.

‘Yes,’ said Okada. ‘I saw ten thousand die for the Emperor, but the Americans weren’t impressed.’

It was a dangerous statement to make: he was still not thinking Japanese. But the corporal’s expression didn’t change. ‘One doesn’t die to impress the enemy. But maybe you Saipanese think differently. You may find it very difficult back here in the homeland.’

‘I do,’ said Okada with heartfelt emphasis.

Then the corporal unexpectedly smiled. ‘You’ll survive. How is the war going down there?’

You’re losing it, just as you’re losing it everywhere else. ‘Not well. But all isn’t lost yet.’

‘Of course not.’ But the corporal’s smile suggested he might be thinking otherwise. He nodded to his partner and the two of them, acknowledging Okada’s bow of the head with upraised sticks, moved on down the street. Okada, aware of the now not-so-polite stares of the passersby, moved quickly on his way towards the station, which he could now see at the end of the street.

He had cleared his first hurdle, but it was no more than a low brush fence in what might prove to be a marathon steeplechase, where the hurdles would get higher, would be topped with thorns and have deep ditches on the far side. He remembered a Hearst Metrotone newsreel of the English Grand National and the frightening jumps that the horses had had to negotiate. The horses had had it easy.

When he got into the station he found it was crowded. A hospital train must have just come and gone; wounded soldiers lay on stretchers in neat rows like packing-house carcases. Civilians would occasionally stop by one or two of the more conscious wounded and say a word, but no fuss was made; Okada could imagine the bright-smiled activity of Red Cross volunteers if these were American wounded coming home. He saw a few medics hovering near the men on the stretchers, but there did not appear to be any doctors. He had heard stories in the field of how Japanese doctors had neglected the wounded, as if the latter had shirked their duty as soldiers, by getting in the way of a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.

He pushed his way through the crowd, joined a queue at the single ticket office. Twenty minutes passed before he reached the window. He asked for a ticket to Nayora.

‘Where’s your pass?’ The clerk was old and tired and had a voice that sounded like a rusty-edged saw.

Okada had the quick wit not to say ‘What pass?’ He had seen the man in front of him push across a piece of paper, but he had thought it was some fare concession certificate. Now he realized that, for all their thoroughness in briefing him, Embury and the others had missed out on some small details; small but important. Okada decided to make use of his accent.

‘I’ve just landed here. I’m from Saipan and Luzon. I came up on the same ship as those men along there.’ He nodded towards the wounded beyond the line behind him. He had no idea where the soldiers had come from, but he took the risk that the ticket clerk also did not know. ‘I still have to get all my papers.’

‘Can’t give a ticket without papers.’ The clerk quickened the saw of his voice. ‘Stand aside.’

Okada stood aside, feeling conspicuous; he glanced covertly around to see if there were any police nearby. He could see none, but he moved hastily away from the window before the clerk became too conscientious and started yelling for the arrest of a man trying to travel without a pass. Okada cursed San Diego for its ignorance, but the cursing relieved neither his feelings nor the situation. He moved to the outskirts of the crowd, down towards one end of the platform.

He was standing there, debating his chances of crossing the tracks and trying to swing up into the train from the wrong side when it came in, when a voice beside him said, ‘Want to buy a pass?’

He looked sideways at the man and had to choke the laugh in his chest. He looked like Joe Penner, or anyway a Japanese version; and though he had spoken in Japanese, he had exactly the same delivery as the comedian: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ But this man would sell anything, the hustler at the world’s railroad stations.

‘Genuine or forged?’ Okada said.

‘Makes no difference. The old man in the ticket office wouldn’t know – all he wants is a bit of paper.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty yen.’

‘You could sell me a girl for the night for that.’ They had given him those sort of details, as if sex had a place in the price index.

‘Of course. But she couldn’t carry you to wherever you want to go.’

Okada looked around. No one was watching him and the hustler; then he saw the soldier on the nearest stretcher staring straight at him. For a moment he felt a sense of shame; then he put it out of his mind. He had no obligation to this soldier, the man had not been fighting for him. He took out a twenty-yen note and gave it to the hustler. The man, with a smile as forged as the pass, handed over a piece of paper.

‘This had better work, or I’ll come looking for you and break your neck.’ Okada tried to sound menacing, but the hustler seemed unimpressed.

‘Have a good journey,’ he said, and went off with a bent-kneed walk that looked more like Groucho Marx’s than Joe Penner’s.

Okada looked at the pass; it looked genuine enough to be accepted. Then he turned back towards the line in front of the ticket office. As he passed the end of the stretcher line he looked down at the wounded soldier, who was still staring accusingly at him. He paused, wanting to say something to the man but unable to think of anything: scorn upset him, even that of an enemy. Then he saw that the soldier was beyond scorn or any other opinion: he was dead. Okada bent and gently closed the sightless eyes.

When he reached the ticket window again the old clerk barely looked at him as he presented the pass and asked for a ticket to Nayora. Maybe he knew the hustler and his black market in passes; or maybe he was just another very minor bureaucrat who would settle for any piece of paper so long as the system was not disrupted. He certainly was not looking for a spy travelling without the proper pass.

The train came in half an hour later. Okada caught it, stood in a crowded compartment and wondered if he would have any difficulty with Natasha Cairns when he made contact with her this evening. He felt exactly as he had as a boy and a young man: in his father’s homeland but not at all at home.

3

‘Every nation must be taught its proper place,’ Chojiro Okada had said. ‘If every country in the world were allowed its own sovereignty, there would be nothing but anarchy. Japan would not be at war with America if the Americans had only understood that.’

Tom had always been respectful in his arguments with his father; it was the only way the arguments could be continued. ‘Dad, there’s no natural hierarchy for nations—’

Chojiro Okada waved a hand of dismissal. He had a working man’s hands, roughened and blunted by his early years in America, but they were capable of graceful movement. ‘Of course there is. Why do you think the British and the French and the Dutch founded their empires?’

‘I always thought it was for trade—’

‘That was only part of it. They all three consider themselves superior to the people they colonized. They have no right to be in Asia. We Japanese are the superior ones in Asia, we are the ones who should be teaching the others their proper place.’

Chojiro Okada had been preaching the same doctrine to his son ever since the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, when Tom had been fifteen years old. The boy, intent on his own small battles in high school, had listened politely but without interest. Chojiro had tried to tell him that his own private battles had been far worse. But one could never tell the young about the past, there was never any comparison in their eyes with the present, neither for good nor for ill.

‘There’s none so blind as the young,’ he said.

‘What?’ Tsuchi, his wife, was busy cooking supper. She had become accustomed to his talking to himself, if only because she had forced him into the habit.

‘Nothing.’ Only a little less blind was a wife.

He walked out of the hut, pulling his hat down over his brow against the pale blue glare of the Wyoming sky. The mountain peak had the sharp outline of winter; much sharper than the peaks had been back home. When they had brought him and his family here to Blood Mountain relocation camp two years ago he had felt a bitter, masochistic joy at how the Americans had spun the wheel full circle to grind him under again. He had got out of the bus that had brought them from Green River, where they had been unloaded from the train that had brought them from California, and he had looked around at the wide landscape, thinking how little it seemed to have changed since he had first seen it forty-one years ago.

‘Welcome back,’ he had said sardonically, but he had said it to himself, a private joke that he knew was pointless to share with his family. None of them, not even Tsuchi, knew what he had endured here.

He had come to the United States from Nagasaki in 1901, when he was twenty-one years old. He was middle class, descendant of a long line of weapon makers who were more than artisans; the line could be traced back to one of the master swordsmiths of Tanega who were the first Japanese introduced to guns by Portuguese traders in the middle of the sixteenth century. Okada guns and swords were bought and prized by army and naval officers; Chojiro had completed his apprenticeship when he got into trouble. He had never told his own family why he had left Japan: he had climbed into bed with his eldest brother’s wife, something his brother’s wife had liked but his brother hadn’t. He had landed in San Francisco and, through one of the boarding-houses that also acted as employment agents, he had got one of the few jobs then available to Orientals: working on the railroad. He had worked for a year in Wyoming, never becoming accustomed to the vastness of the landscape; it had seemed to reduce himself in his own estimation, making him ridiculously small in any scheme of things. He had received poor pay, poor accommodation and poor food, had been abused day after day by the Irish foremen who, with the advent of the Chinese and Japanese labourers, had now moved up the social scale. It was the first time the Irish long upper lip had come close to being a patrician feature.

The day his contract ended he had left the railroad and gone down to Idaho to work on sugar-beet farms, where the pay was no better but where the farmers, Mormons who themselves knew a little about discrimination, treated him better than had the Irish foremen. Four years later, having saved a little money won at gambling, he had moved to Los Angeles. Since the Mafia and Bugsy Siegel had not yet arrived in California, there was little call for a gunsmith; men were shot dead occasionally, but a Colt .45 was usually sufficient for the deed and it could be bought on mail order. He drifted to Gardena, where there was a small Japanese community, and there he started a nursery, as much by chance as by choice. It had been a hard struggle for the first five years; then he had begun to prosper. He had dreamed of going home to Japan, but he was still in disgrace with the family and he would not return till his parents wrote him to come back. His brother had divorced his errant wife and taken another, but that hadn’t altered his parents’ opinion of Chojiro.

In 1914 he had married Tsuchi Yataba, a ‘picture bride’ he had chosen from a selection sent him by an agent. There had never been any love in the marriage, but there had been respect on both sides: it was enough for each of them. There had been three children: Tamezo, born in 1916 after Tsuchi had had a miscarriage with her first pregnancy; then the two girls, Etsu and Masako, born two and three years later respectively. Their father never forgave them for calling themselves, Tom, Ettie and Madge when they started going to school and, despite their protests, he never called them anything but their Japanese names.

Ettie was now walking up the camp’s main road towards him, picking her way carefully through the dust. The camp these days was half-empty and the camp authorities put in no more than was absolutely necessary to maintain the roads and huts. Earth was piled up against the walls of the huts as insulation against the bitter winds that blew down from the mountains in winter; they reminded him of the sod houses, built by the pioneer settlers, that he and some of the other railroad workers had lived in all those years ago. He regretted, more than he could tell them, that his wife and daughters had to live in such conditions. But it was not his fault: everything was to be blamed on the Americans.

‘Another letter from Tom.’ Ettie held up letter, as she always did, though she knew her father, as he always did, would not ask what news it contained. But this time she did tell him: ‘He is not in the fighting any more, he’s safe somewhere. He said he can’t say where, just that it was some sort of training school.’

Chojiro Okada said nothing, looking away from her.

‘Dad—’ Ettie was a pretty girl with a soft, sad voice that suggested she was ready to weep for the world; instead, she was an incurable optimist, an American trait her father found insufferable. ‘I’m going to Chicago.’

‘What for?’

‘To work as a nurse. I’m tired of living here at Blood Mountain.’

Blood Mountain had been turned into a camp for incorrigibles, the ‘disloyals’ as they were called, those who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Some of the women had been passed as trustworthy and were allowed to take jobs in nearby towns; Ettie worked for a dentist in Green River and her sister Madge was a cook on a neighbouring ranch. They were looked upon as traitors by some of the more aggressive men in the camp, but they were never subjected to any abuse because of the respect in which Chojiro, a true patriot, was held.

‘Madge is going with me.’

‘You will not be allowed.’

‘Permission has already been granted.’

‘Not by me.’

Her voice was truly sad now. ‘Dad, Madge and I are grown women. You don’t try to understand that, just as you never tried to understand Tom’s point of view—’

‘Don’t mention your brother.’ He had stopped calling him my son. That implied some bond still existed between them, when there was none.

Ettie bowed her head. Whenever she was with her father, speaking in Japanese as he insisted, she automatically fell into certain Japanese gestures. ‘Madge and I will be leaving in two days’ time. We’d like to go with your blessing.’

He walked away from her, up towards the barbed wire that ran right round the camp. He was aware of the soldier, rifle slung over his shoulder, watching him from the nearest guard-tower, but he ignored him. There had been several escapes from the camp, including one attempt at a mass break-out; half a dozen of the escapers had been shot and all but three of the others had been recaptured. He had never himself attempted to escape, because he had known that his lot would not be improved: he would only have been at large in America. He was prepared to wait till the war was over, till Japan had won and he could go home again to the land of his ancestors. But lately he had been kept awake at night by doubts; if American propaganda could be believed the war was going badly for Japan. He was querulous with impotent rage at the gods. He had never been religious, but he had to blame someone other than the generals for the way things had gone. It did not occur to him to blame the Emperor.

In 1923, when his brother had died, Chojiro’s parents had written to say he was forgiven and was no longer in disgrace. In the late summer of that year he went home alone, leaving Tsuchi and the children in Gardena. Getting off the ship in Yokohama he went straight to a geisha house, determined to plunge into old customs as soon as possible; if there were any geishas in Gardena, he had never met any. He was still in the house when the great earthquake of 1 September struck at just over a minute before noon. He had been dressed and ready to leave when the house suddenly fell down around him. He survived, unhurt but for cuts and bruises, and for the next seven days distinguished himself by his bravery and his devotion to the injured. Four hours after the earthquake struck, a cyclone blew up, fanning the burning buildings and houses into an inferno. Over 100,000 people died or were posted missing and Chojiro would carry the memories of that week with him forever. He was superstitious enough to wonder at first if it meant some omen about his return to Japan.

But no: he went home to Nagasaki a hero. Both Asahi and Mainichi ran stories on him and he went home to more than just a prodigal son’s welcome. From then on he had known he would never be happy to die in America, that eventually he would have to be laid to rest in the shadow of the hills outside Nagasaki where he had grown up. He had gone back again in 1927, telling his father he would come home to stay when he had made himself a rich man in America. He had become Westernized to that extent: the prodigal son is even more welcome if he brings home his own fatted calf. He had come to realize, though reluctantly, that he lived better in America than his parents did in Japan.

In 1929 he had returned to Japan once more, this time taking Tamezo with him. The 13-year-old boy had not minded going; after all, his best friend, Kenji Minato, was also going, with his father. The two boys had been left with their respective grandparents; at the end of two years Tamezo had been glad to return to America, but Kenji had stayed on, content to be thoroughly Japanese. Chojiro had been bitterly disappointed and almost uncomprehending when Tamezo, in his first fit of filial rebellion, told him how much he had hated Japan and everything about it. He had taken Tamezo with him again in the summer of 1937, when Hideki and Mieko Minato had gone home to live in Japan for good. But the visit had not been a success. Tamezo had been politely respectful towards his grandparents, but adamant towards his father that Japan was not for him.

Tamezo had visited the Minatos in their new home in Tokyo and come away shocked. ‘Ken’s become one hundred per cent Japanese,’ he told his father. ‘Ken – he wouldn’t let me call him that, like I used to. He insisted on Kenji—’

‘As he should,’ said Chojiro. ‘You should take him as an example.’

‘Dad, I don’t want that sort of example. For Pete’s sake, I just want to be an American – what’s wrong with that?’ As if to prove his point, Tamezo spoke in English. ‘That’s where we live, isn’t it?’

‘Only till the right time comes to leave,’ said Chojiro in Japanese.

Over the next few years Chojiro talked of going home to Japan to stay. But, though he was not demonstrative, he loved his children and he came to realize that, if he and Tsuchi retired to Japan, Tamezo and his sisters would refuse to accompany them. They had become Americans, despite all his sometimes harsh discipline that was meant to make them Japanese.

He had welcomed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as if it were a blow for freedom. ‘You will see now what Japan can teach the world. There are still too many barbarians masquerading as civilized people.’

‘Hitler, for instance?’ said Tamezo, now insisting on being called Tom.

‘Germany is like Japan, it is entitled to its own sphere of influence. Do you think the barbarians we have in Washington are any better?’

They had argued, stiffly polite, with Tom choking on his anger at his father’s attitude. Then the barbarians did start to emerge. Westbrook Pegler wrote in his column: ‘The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now – and to hell with habeas corpus.’ California’s Attorney-General, Earl Warren, demonstrated that Justice could be as blind in one eye as any politician cared to make her. The Western Defence commander, Lieutenant-General De-Witt, showed his stars as a racist; he took an overdose of patriotism, a bad thing for military men. There were no American-Japanese, as far as the bigots were concerned: they were Japs and nothing else, not even to be trusted as much as Germans. The Yellow Peril was peril indeed, and on 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt, one of Tom’s heroes, signed Executive Order 9066, interning all Japanese from the West Coast.

‘I told you so,’ said Chojiro and packed his bags for the internment camp at Santa Anita racetrack, content to have been proven Japanese by the barbarians. Though they did not know it, he and his family were quartered in a horsestall that had once housed Phar Lap, an Australian national hero that had come to California and, according to Australian legend, been poisoned by the Americans. No one was safe from the barbarians, not even horses.

He had ignored Tamezo’s vehement protests to the authorities at Santa Anita and then at Blood Mountain. It was shameful to have a son who so openly and loudly declared his allegiance to the American flag; so he went out of his way to shut America out of the family circle. In the camp he insisted that nothing but Japanese should be spoken amongst them. He had not taken part in any of the pro-Japanese demonstrations by the Issei and the Kibei, the Japan-educated Nisei, leaving that to the younger men; but he had sat in on the meetings that had planned the demonstrations. When a group of Kibei had attacked Tamezo, who had abused them for their treason to the land of their birth, he had turned his back and walked away, though it had hurt him more than he would ever confess, even to Tsuchi.

When in 1943 Tamezo had, after a number of applications, at last been accepted for army service, Chojiro had once more turned his back. This time he had moved out of the family hut and remained out of it till Tamezo had left for Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Once his son had gone he had joined all the demonstrations, as if he were fighting his own small private war. He had to wash away his shame in front of the other Issei.

‘Okada-san—’

He came back from his reverie of the past, turned away from the barbed wire to see Yosuke Mazaki standing a few yards from him. ‘I’m sorry, I was a long way away then – What is it?’

Mazaki was one of the Kibei, a young man whose fanaticism sometimes made even Chojiro uncomfortable. He was a hero who, fortunately, knew he would never be called upon to be heroic; such men are often more dangerous to their cause than to their enemies. Chojiro did not like him, but tolerated him.

‘Okada-san, I’ve had a message. Kenji Minato has been held by American Naval Intelligence for the past six months down in San Diego.’

Chojiro Okada worked his lips up and down over his teeth, the only indication he ever showed that he was perturbed. As a young man he had been like his son, profligate with his emotions and the expression of them; but the years in America had taught him the dangers and non-profit in such indulgence. He had tried to look calm, but it was always the calm of a thinly frozen lake.

‘What else did the message say?’ He had no part in the espionage network that ran through the camps and through other channels of which he had no knowledge at all. But it had been he whom Kenji Minato had come to first.

Mazaki did not look at him directly, as if turning his face away from the steel of the wind. ‘That he has now escaped.’

Chojiro Okada had been surprised when, two days after Pearl Harbor, Kenji Minato had phoned him. ‘I should like to meet with you, Okada-san. But please do not mention me to your family, not even to Tamezo.’

He had driven all the way out to Santa Monica in the two-year-old Buick which he had to sell only three months later for two hundred dollars, the best offer he could get before he and his family were carted off to Santa Anita racetrack. The irony was that on that day of the enforced sale in Gardena there had been several vultures with German names.

He and Kenji Minato had walked up and down under the palm trees on the promenade. People looked at them suspiciously or, in the case of one man, accusingly. He was an elderly man, wearing a faded American Legion cap, and he stood at the promenade railing staring out to sea, towards Japan, then looking back at Okada and Minato as if expecting them to start signalling the invasion fleet just beyond the horizon of his dimly-sighted eyes.

‘Why didn’t you come to visit us?’ Chojiro Okada had been circumspect in his greeting of the younger man, expressing no surprise. The war with Japan was only forty-eight hours old and already bricks had shattered the glasshouses in Gardena. Kenji Minato, wherever he had come from was not here just to pay his respects to his father’s old friend.

‘I had work to do. Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego. I very rarely came to Los Angeles.’

It was a moment or two before the significance of the three cities he had named besides Los Angeles sank in. ‘You were attached to the US Navy?’ Then he smiled at his own naivety; Minato mirrored his smile. Over by the railing the Legion veteran glared at them, then looked hurriedly out to sea again; he hated all Slant-Eyes, but especially ones who smiled as if the war was already won. Okada ignored the veteran of the war long gone; he nodded approvingly at the young man who was fighting the present war, albeit covertly. ‘You started early.’

‘Almost three years ago.’

‘Why are you telling me this? Are you trying to recruit me? I’m too old for such a task, Kenji. In any case, I think it’s too late.’ He glanced across at the Legionnaire by the railing. ‘They’ll be watching us like hawks from now on.’

‘Probably. But it wasn’t you I wanted to recruit. I have to go back to Seattle. We need someone here in Los Angeles as a contact. Someone who can be trusted. Someone younger than you, Okada-san.’

Okada smiled again, bitterly this time. ‘You’re not thinking of Tamezo?’

‘I was hoping … He won’t be interned. He has a good reputation—’

‘He is against us.’ It shamed him to confess it to the younger man, the true Japanese. ‘We argue … I wouldn’t put it past him to betray you, Kenji.’ They were speaking quietly, but in English; there was no point in stirring up the natives too much. For the time being there was safety in appearing to be American. He wondered if the Mexicans down around Olvera Street would give up speaking Spanish for the duration. ‘No, you could not trust Tamezo.’

Minato looked disappointed. ‘I’m sorry about that. We were friends once – it would have been good to be working together … Do you know someone else?’

It had never occurred to him that he would be called upon to engage in such work. Spying (even the word was abhorrent) was for professionals. ‘I can make enquiries—’

‘Be discreet. Careful.’ For the first time Minato showed some of the unease behind the relaxed exterior. Had bricks already been thrown at him?

‘Of course. It will take a week or two.’ He had immediately thought of two men he could approach. ‘But I cannot help you myself. If ever Tamezo found out …’

‘I understand,’ said Minato and looked as if he did.

As they walked away the old Legionnaire hurled abuse after them, only grapeshot but it was a beginning. Chojiro Okada wondered if it were the veterans of the last war who always fired the first shot in the next. He would have to study more history.

Now Yosuke Mazaki was telling him that Kenji Minato had been arrested by US Navy Intelligence, though he had since escaped. ‘Will he call on the network to help him?’

‘Not here in the States. He is already in Mexico City, or was at last report.’ Mazaki faced him, narrowing his eyes against the chilling wind. ‘There is something else, Okada-san. Your son Tamezo Okada was also held by the Americans in San Diego. But he, too, has now disappeared.’

He felt a lift of hope; the war was lost but his son had been won over. ‘You mean he has been working with Kenji Minato?’

‘We don’t think so, Okada-san. We think he is a spy, but for the Americans. The network will try to track him down. In the meantime it is informing Tokyo.’

Chapter Two

1

Natasha Cairns had arrived in Japan by the most circuitous of routes, through the passions of randy forbears, her own ambitions and the love of a man she had come to love too late, after he was dead. Her mother Lily had been born in Harbin, the result of two roubles’ worth of sex between a Chinese prostitute and a Russian soldier having a night off from the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Lily Tolstoy, a surname she gave herself when she was fourteen, left Harbin on the same day that she left school. She went south to Shanghai, where she worked her way up various ladders and traders till she had established herself as one of Shanghai’s better ladies of pleasure. Then she fell in love with one of her clients, an aberration that ladies of her profession should avoid at all costs; she married Henry Greenway, a manager for Jardine Matheson, and donned respectability, a gown that did not fit. She bore Henry a daughter, named her Natasha, gave her to the French nuns to educate and left for Saigon, still half in love with Henry but totally out of love with respectability and life on a Jardine Matheson manager’s pay.

Natasha knew nothing of her mother’s background; and those who did know it kept it from her. Henry did his meagre best to be a father to her; but expatriate Englishmen do not make good parents, especially of girls. Most of them were, at that time, afraid of females; to be responsible for one was too much. He would look at Natasha and see her mother and wonder, though he had genuinely loved Lily, what had ever possessed him to marry her. Of course, though he would not admit it to himself, he had married her because it had hurt him to share her with other men.

There was a great deal of her mother in Natasha; she had a saint’s name but the devil in her blood. Or so said the nuns, who knew more about the Blood of Christ than they did about the blood of young girls. It was they who had given her the saint’s name, Therèse, one that Natasha never used. She already knew that the men she saw outside the convent walls weren’t interested in saints.

In 1938, when she was sixteen, her father was killed. He was up-country, in Sikang, trying to sell Jardine Matheson goods to a warlord, when the warlord took a sudden dislike to Henry, Jardine Matheson, all things British or the goods themselves: the reason was never determined, but Henry was suddenly dead. He left Natasha a small inheritance, his cigarette card collection of English cricketers and a sense of loss that came as a surprise to her. Her true love for certain men, first her father and later Keith Cairns, was delayed. It was as if her absent mother had left behind the unspoken advice that nothing in her heart should ever be committed to men.

She ran away from the convent and went further south, to Hong Kong. She was already beautiful, her beauty apparent in the eyes of perhaps too many beholders; there was a certain coolness to her beauty, almost a remoteness which would suddenly be denied when she smiled. Men besieged her, and she recognized the pleasures of being a prize.

She did not become a prostitute, more a floating mistress: there is a difference of more than just price. In the middle class morality of the British colony, her mixed blood put a brand on her; even a girl with the blood of St Francis of Assisi and one of the better Sung princesses in her would have been looked upon as a half-caste. Though Natasha looked more Western than Eastern, there was a slant to her eyes, a tilt to her cheekbones and an ivory sheen to her skin that set her apart from the Roses and Daisies of Bournemouth, Scunthorpe and other respectable breeding grounds. She graced tea parties at Government House and receptions at the Repulse Bay Hotel, but she was never invited to dinner parties at private homes on the Peak. Then in March 1940 she met Keith Cairns when he came to Hong Kong for what was, supposedly, a conference on Oriental art. Only later did she learn that it was a conference of Intelligence agents.

Keith Cairns was that rare man, an academic with the proper flair for courting a woman. He was forty-two years old, roughly good-looking, had had no wives but a succession of mistresses and, at his first sight of Natasha, decided then was the time to settle down with a wife, one who would also be his mistress. He was a romantic, which was one reason he had become an agent for MI6, and though he did not sweep Natasha off her feet, since she was on her back beneath him when he asked her to marry him, he overwhelmed her with his passionate persistence. She married him for a variety of reasons: she liked him; she had a sudden, if fleeting, yearning for respectability; she knew that the war in Europe would soon spread to Asia. Keith Cairns told her that Japan would probably enter the war, but that he, and she, would be safe in Tokyo.

‘Tokyo is my home,’ he told her, ‘even though I’m a Scot. I live there and I’ll probably die there because, whatever the Japanese have done outside Japan, in their own country I find them honourable and admirable and I want to go on living amongst them.’

Later she would find that frame of mind at odds with his being a spy; but then she would also find him a mixture that, because of his early death, would always remain a puzzle to her. He was kind and cruel, romantic and hard-headed, daring and cautious; he was a mass of contradictions, which perhaps was why the Japanese, a nation of contradictions, liked him and he them. But he loved Natasha as none of her patrons ever had and eventually, but too late, she loved him. She took over from him as an MI6 agent as belated payment for what he had meant to her. Having no country of her own, she was neither friend of Britain nor enemy of Japan. She was, as Keith Cairns had been, a romantic, seduced by the thought of danger, trying to prove, without any hope that the proof would be made public, that life for her was more than bed, board and baubles. She was, in the most hazardous way, still looking for respectability.

‘I got some extra fish on the black market,’ said Yuri Suzuki, coming up from the village. ‘But we are running out of money.’

She was a round little woman, a dumpling spiced with iron filings; Natasha had never discovered her age: she could have been anything between forty and sixty. She had been Keith Cairns’s housekeeper for five years when he had brought Natasha home; they had met like two wives over the still-warm body of a bigamist. But when Keith had died, Yuri had, as if there was no longer anything to fight over, abruptly changed her attitude; she had taken over as Natasha’s surrogate mother. Short-tempered, ungracious, she nevertheless had a motherly instinct she could not deny: she had a need to take care of someone.

‘I have nothing else to sell,’ said Natasha.

She had already sold the jewelry that her admirers in Hong Kong had given her. She had always kept it hidden while Keith had been alive, not wanting to remind him blatantly of what she had been before she had met him. After his death she had brought it out and, piece by piece, had found buyers for it. Now all she and Yuri had to live on was the small pension that the university, with punctilious regard for its dead professor, still paid her. Keith had died after a bungled operation for appendicitis, a mundane death for an agent, and the university authorities had suffered a loss of face in that it was one of their own medical professors who had performed the fatal operation. The pension payment arrived each month like a penance.

‘You should ask your friends to send money.’

Yuri knew of the short-wave radio hidden in the secret cellar of their house. She had never made any comment on Cairnssan’s extracurricular work as a spy, as if it were just another bachelor’s peccadillo, on a par with his drinking and his bringing home women who were no better than they should have been. When Natasha had taken over the broadcasting, Yuri had continued to make no comment, treating it as if it were the normal pan of running a household. Natasha sometimes felt uneasy about her, but she had no alternative but to trust her.

‘Yuri, how can they do that? Cable it to the General Post Office? One hundred pounds payable on the order of the British Government?’

‘They should pay you for what you are doing,’ said Yuri stubbornly. She was not thinking of the risk, but only of the actual work being done. ‘Work should be paid for.’

‘You sound like a trade unionist.’ Natasha had learned from Keith, a born Tory, of the blight one could find in Britain.

‘What’s that?’ sniffed Yuri, and on the other side of the world Keir Hardie and company went on strike in their graves.

Then Natasha saw the local sergeant of police and a stout man in civilian clothes coming up the path towards them. Nayora was a private resort village that had been developed by a group of upper-middle-class professionals just before World War One: government officials, lawyers, doctors who did not want to have to mix in their holiday time with the rapidly expanding lower middle class. All the villas stood in what had once been carefully tended gardens; now, in the present war, one elderly gardener ran an arthritic-gaited race against galloping grass and exploding shrubs. Some of the old families still lived here, though they did not mix with the alien residents who had been foisted on them. Nayora had always been a law-abiding community and even with the advent of the aliens the authorities had seen no need to enlarge the village force of Sergeant Masuda and his rather dull-witted constable.

Sergeant Masuda, who had got where he was by being obsequious, almost contorted himself in his deference to the man he brought to the gate of Natasha’s villa. ‘Major Nagata is from Tokyo, a very important man. We are honoured that he should visit us.’

Nagata, who wrote bad poetry, saw all this as snow falling on Mount Fuji: praise, if taken with proper grace, can only make a man look better. He smiled at Natasha as if to make her feel she was properly honoured by his arrival. ‘Mrs Cairns, forgive my manners. I should have warned you I was coming. But, unfortunately, in my profession warnings are often misunderstood. Or taken advantage of.’

‘What is your profession, Major Nagata?’

‘He is from the kempei,’ said Sergeant Masuda, rolling his eyes as if he were introducing one of the Kuni-Tsu-Kami, the gods of the earth.

‘It is difficult for the secret police to be secret when one is accompanied by a Greek chorus,’ said Nagata. ‘Go and arrest someone, sergeant. Leave me alone with Mrs Cairns.’

Masuda backed off with a bow that bent him double, then went lolloping down the path with his peculiar loose-kneed gait. Nagata looked after him, then turned back to Natasha and Yuri.

‘You may dismiss your servant.’

Yuri snorted, showing what she thought of the police, secret or otherwise, then, without a bow, she turned and marched up into the house. Nagata looked after her too.

‘Does she give you any trouble?’

‘If she does, I tolerate it.’ Natasha felt far less comfortable than she sounded. ‘What do you want, major?’

It suddenly struck her that, for all his fawning towards Nagata, Sergeant Masuda had taken a grave risk in identifying the secret policeman. The kempei was never spoken of openly; certainly not between an official and a woman like Natasha. The sergeant owed her nothing and she wondered why he had put himself at risk by warning her who Nagata was. Did he know about the radio set in the secret cellar?

‘Do you have a pass to leave Nayora, Mrs Cairns?’

‘Yes, a twelve-hour one, once a week. I report to Sergeant Masuda before I leave and when I return.’

‘Where do you go to?’

‘To Tokyo.’

‘What do you do there?’

‘Go shopping, mostly.’

‘On the black market?’ He smiled, to show he did not think it was a major crime. Though his teeth were not coated, they had a yellow tint, like an old man’s.

‘Of course.’ She also smiled.

‘Do you visit anyone? Friends?’

She thought of only Professor Kambe as a friend; the others had been friends of Keith’s and still tolerated her, mainly because the men amongst them admired her beauty and some of them, she knew, had dreams that some day she might be their mistress. Her vanity was very clear-sighted, enabling her to see others’ weaknesses as well as her own assets.

‘Some people at the university.’

‘Some who work for the government and the military?’

‘They may.’ She knew exactly who did; but she was certain that Nagata also knew them. She had the sudden feeling that he knew all about her, that his questions were designed not to give him information but to trip her up. ‘But you know, major, that men never discuss their work with women, especially women who are not their wives.’

‘Did Professor Cairns ever discuss his work with you?’

‘Never. He was Scottish – they are as bad as the Japanese. Do you discuss your work with your wife?’ She was uneasy, but she had always believed that attack was the best form of defence. Especially if it was accompanied by what Keith used to call her whore’s smile. In his cruel moments he could be as loving as a rugby forward, which he had once been.

‘Hardly,’ said Nagata, with a policeman’s smile. Then, still showing his yellow teeth, like a bamboo blade, he said, ‘Do you ever visit a woman called Eastern Pearl?’

Natasha frowned, wondering where this question was supposed to lead. ‘Eastern Pearl? Is she a geisha or some sort of entertainer?’

‘You might call her an entertainer. She is the mistress of one of our military leaders, General Imamaru. I thought you must have heard of her. People gossip about her.’

Natasha had indeed heard of the woman, but had paid no heed to the talk; Tokyo, she guessed, was like all capitals in wartime, full of mistresses. They were part of the fortunes, or misfortunes, of war, a compensation, for those who could afford them, for rationing and other inconveniences.

‘I’ve heard of her vaguely. But my friends in Tokyo are not the sort who gossip.’

‘Oh? I thought gossip was a major discipline amongst university people.’

‘You never went to university, major?’ Natasha had been well coached by Keith: she recognized the prejudice.

‘Just once,’ said Nagata. ‘In Mukden. To arrest one of the professors.’

‘I hope you got a good pass.’ She knew she was being impolite, keeping this policeman out in the cold waste of the garden, but she could not bring herself to invite him into the house.

‘I think so. The professor was executed.’ Nagata was enjoying the company of this young woman, though he wished she would invite him into her house. He did not like standing out in the open; he suffered from agoraphobia, the disease endemic to secret policemen. ‘I believe you have Swedish papers, Mrs Cairns.’

The change of tack was too abrupt. Natasha felt that her eyes must have squinted, as if she had been slapped. ‘Ye-es …’

‘Your father was Swedish?’

Three months after he had brought her to Tokyo, Keith had come home one day with the papers. She had had none up till then other than a badly forged British passport given her by one of her benefactors in Hong Kong. She had queried Keith where he had got the papers and why she should be Swedish.

‘Because before very long Japan is going to be in the war and if you and I are separated it will be best if you are a neutral.’

‘But why should we be separated? If they send you back to England, why won’t you take me with you?’ For the first time she had wondered if England was like Hong Kong, where driftwood, no matter how beautiful, was not displayed in the best houses.

‘I’ll take you with me, darling heart – if they send me back—’ It was another year before she had learned of his espionage work. ‘In the meantime you had a Swedish father – a ship’s captain—’

‘Swedish? But I have black hair and brown eyes—’

Physical features Major Nagata now remarked upon: ‘You don’t look Swedish, Mrs Cairns.’

‘My father came from the far north, Lapland.’ Keith had told her to say that; she had no idea whether Laplanders were blond or brunette. ‘Or so my mother said. I never knew him.’

‘No, of course not.’ Nagata was accustomed to liars; the secret police could be reduced by half if everyone told the truth. He did not resent the lying: he did not want to be put out of a job. He sighed contentedly, assured of a continuing supply of liars, including this charming one. ‘Mrs Cairns, we have made a few enquiries about Eastern Pearl. At one time she was married to an Englishman named Henry Greenway. We also have a file on you, courtesy of the Hong Kong police. They left so many things unattended to when we took over from them.’ He made it sound as if the conquest and rape of Hong Kong had been a business merger. ‘The file shows that your father was not a Swede. He was Henry Greenway and you were born in Shanghai, which was where Eastern Pearl married Mr Greenway and then left him.’

Natasha felt as if she were about to shatter into small pieces. She turned slowly, afraid that her legs would buckle under her, and went up the short wide steps to the verandah of the house. Beneath the steps she imagined she could see the small hole in the stone foundations through which she ran the aerial cable when she was broadcasting; everything was suddenly enlarged in her mind’s eye, the hole a gaping tunnel into which Major Nagata was about to push her. She led Nagata into the house and into the drawing-room. She sat down, waited for Nagata to take off his overcoat and seat himself opposite her. It struck her, oddly, as if her mind were seeking distraction, that he was the first man to sit in that particular chair since Keith died.

‘I’ve shocked you, haven’t I, Mrs Cairns? What did that? Finding out that we know all about you?’

It had been partly that; she had never really thought about how efficient the secret police might be. But the major shock had been learning who her mother was. She had often thought of her mother, but her father had brusquely silenced any questions she had asked. He had let slip that her mother had deserted them both but he had told her no more than that. As she grew up she had dreamed of some day meeting her mother, who would be a rich beauty, perhaps a Mongolian princess who had run off with a Rumanian oil tycoon; the reunion would be tearful and happy and very profitable for herself, since she also dreamed of a rich life. Now the thought that she might be about to meet the woman who could be her mother had the chill of a dream that could prove to have gone all wrong. She was a tumble of curiosity, puzzlement and fear; but so far the thought of love hadn’t entered her mind. She had always guarded against harbouring any love for a ghost.

‘I suppose I should have realized that eventually you would know all about me.’ Sitting down, she felt a little stronger: there is great strength in the bum, Keith used to say. Sometimes she had thought a lot of his philosophy had come from a rugby scrum.

‘Oh, we’ve known about you ever since Professor Cairns died.’

Natasha played for time. She called for Yuri to bring some saké, heard a grumpy response that told her the old woman would bring the drinks but in her own time. Natasha did not offer Nagata tea because that would have meant some ceremony and she was determined to keep his visit as short as possible.

She turned back to him. ‘I know nothing about this woman Eastern Pearl.’

‘Mrs Cairns, I am not suggesting you do. Madame Tolstoy knows nothing of you, I’m sure.’

‘Madame Tolstoy?’

‘It is the name she prefers to go by when she is with General Imamaru. It was down in Saigon, where he met her, that she was known as Eastern Pearl. Some people still use it about her in Tokyo. The gossipers, that is.’

‘I’ve only heard the name Eastern Pearl, never Madame Tolstoy.’

‘We must ask her if she has ever used Mrs Greenway.’

Yukio Nagata was an opportunist, a random spinner of webs. Not many babies are born to be secret policemen; he had been one of the very few. At school he had majored in intrigue; so devious was he that he was captain of the school before his fellow students realized how he had achieved it. Drafted into the army for his compulsory military training, he had spent more time studying the officers commanding him than on rudimentary military drill. When he was called back for service in Manchuria he had enough contacts to have himself placed in the secret police. If he had to fight a war, better to be out of range of the enemy. He had come to the conclusion that the present war was going so badly that Japan could not win it. So he had begun to gather evidence, most of it unrelated, that might stand him in good stead if and when the Americans came to claim victory.

‘Are you suggesting, major, that I go and meet this – this Madame Tolstoy – and ask her if she is my mother?’

Round her the house creaked, as if it had shifted on its foundations; she felt that she had no foundations herself. The house was like her, a hybrid, part-European, part-Oriental. It had two storeys and had been built by a doctor who had lived in Germany for four years before World War One; there was a heaviness about it that made it look like a tugboat amongst the yacht-like villas that surrounded it. Inside, the furniture was heavy and dark; the beds were meant to accommodate Valkyries rather than doll-like geishas. Till Keith Cairns had been sent here for internment everything about the house had dwarfed everyone who had stayed in it. Still, Natasha had been fortunate to be able to keep the house for just herself and Yuri and not have other internees forced on her.

‘I shouldn’t want you to force yourself on this woman.’ Nagata carefully arranged the creases in his trouser-legs. He usually wore uniform but today, calling on a beautiful woman, he had decided that his dark blue suit, bought at an English tailor’s in Shanghai, would make him look less threatening and more presentable. Besides, he was not here on official business. ‘I’d have thought you’d be curious to know about your mother.’

‘She may not be my mother,’ said Natasha, more stubborn against the prospect than against him.

‘True. But I have seen her, Mrs Cairns – you haven’t. I assure you there is a distinct resemblance between the two of you. She is a very beautiful woman. So are you.’

‘Thank you.’ His intimacy told her how confident he was. But then the kempei were perhaps always confident? ‘No, I need time to think about it.’

‘Of course.’

Yuri brought in the drinks, prompted more by curiosity than a desire to please. She looked at Natasha for some hint of what was going on, but Natasha was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to take any notice of her maid’s curiosity. Yuri shuffled her feet for a moment, gave a loud sniff and went back into the house.

Nagata sipped his saké. ‘It would be better, Mrs Cairns, if you didn’t think about it too long. You could be very useful to me.’

‘How?’

‘If Madame Tolstoy is your mother – and I’m sure she is – if you could be reunited with her, there could be advantages for both of us. In return for any gossip you could pick up in your mother’s circle, I can arrange that you have a pass to go into Tokyo any time you wish. That would help, wouldn’t it? I mean if you want to buy a few things?’

Food had become very scarce in the past few months and the ration available in the village had been barely enough to ease Natasha’s and Yuri’s hunger. There was a general shortage of food throughout the country, but the alien internees had been the worst hit. Without the food they had managed to buy on the black market, Natasha and Yuri would have gone hungry more than half the time.

‘I can’t buy anything if I have no money, major.’ She was stating a fact, not asking him for money.

He misunderstood her; or pretended to. He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and opened it to show a heavy gold bracelet. Natasha recognized it at once; it had been given to her by a Chinese admirer in Hong Kong. She had sold it three months ago for three hundred yen, less than a third of its value.

‘I’ll continue to hold this as – shall we say, as collateral? I could have you arrested, Mrs Cairns, for dealing on the black market. I know every piece you’ve sold and what you got for it.’

‘Everyone does it. I mean, buys on the black market.’

‘Not everyone, Mrs Cairns, only those with spare cash. A lot of people commit murder, but it’s still a crime. So is dealing on the black market, whether buying or selling. I don’t want to see you in jail – you would be no use to me there. But if you just make yourself useful …’

‘You want me to spy for you?’ She suddenly wanted to laugh at the irony of what she was saying, but managed to restrain herself. All at once she no longer felt in any danger, Major Nagata was no longer threatening her.

‘If you want to be melodramatic – yes.’ He carefully wrapped the gold bracelet back in the handkerchief and put it away in his pocket. ‘I’ll see that you should not go hungry. Food for gossip.’ He chuckled at his play on words and Natasha gave him the smile he expected. ‘We’ll meet once a week and you can tell me what you’ve heard. It should not be hard work for you. It may even be enjoyable, if your mother welcomes you. Life at General Imamaru’s level is very comfortable, I’m told.’

Natasha had begun to feel a certain excitement at the prospect of meeting her mother after all these years; but she could not feel any enjoyment. She hesitated, then took the plunge, into the past as well as into the future: ‘I’ll work for you, Major Nagata. But I’ll need money. I am penniless.’

Nagata smiled at her without smiling, then he took out his wallet and handed her a fifty-yen note. Years of corruption had taught him that his bank account had to have a debit as well as a credit side; he suffered the debit side because less went out than came in. He reached across and dropped the note into Natasha’s lap, a further gesture of intimacy that told her exactly where she stood; or sat. She was his servant.

‘We’ll agree on the terms after your first month’s work, Mrs Cairns. In the meantime that will be enough to be going on with. If your mother welcomes you to her bosom, I’m sure she will also welcome you to her table.’

He stood up, all at once became formal. He bowed, gave her a yellow smile, said goodbye. She escorted him but of the house and he went down the steps, walking with the light step of a man half his weight and one who had got what he had come for.

Yuri came out on the verandah. ‘I was listening. He is a dangerous man. You should not encourage him.’

‘It’s not a question of encouraging him. Did you also hear what he said about my mother?’

‘Yes.’ Yuri was tough-minded, as one should be who wants to be a surrogate aunt. She tightened the sash of her brown work-kimono, making the action look as if she were tightening a noose round someone’s neck. ‘I had better come with you when you go to meet her. You will need my advice.’

She was a proprietary servant. She would have made a good trade union official. She went back into the house, leaving Natasha to contemplate the darkening day and, possibly, an even more darkening future. The chrysanthemum bushes were like twisted balls of faggots. The maple tree beside the house was a many-armed crucifix. Out on the bay, on the leaden sea under the leaden sky, the fishing-boats, sails furled, looked like floating scarecrows in fields that no longer had crops. She felt utterly depressed, though not afraid.

She had never felt afraid of the future; living the life she had led, she had accepted there was only tomorrow to worry about. To think further, to next year, or the next ten, would have spoiled the present; even Keith’s unexpected death had brought no fear of what might lie ahead. She could be afraid, terribly so, but the cause and its effect had to be immediate. She wore dreams like armour.

‘Ah well,’ she sighed, and folded the fifty-yen note Nagata had given her and put it in her pocket. At least she would be well fed if and when she went to meet her mother. She practised the word, but could hardly get her tongue round it: ‘Mother … ?’

That night she made her monthly report to the US Signal Corps station in the Aleutians. She said she had nothing to report, but the station had a message for her. A man would soon be on his way to Japan and would contact her on arrival. His code name was Joshua. She took down the message, decoded it and sat wondering at how, on this otherwise ordinary day, the world was suddenly contracting.

2

‘One should never waste one’s time trying to impress those lower than oneself,’ said Professor Kambe. ‘One should only try to impress one’s peers or above. That, as the commercial men say, is where the dividends are.’

Natasha had heard this sort of mock heresy at parties at the university, but she had not expected to hear it in a house as grand as General Imamaru’s. The small group of men round the professor, however, raised their whisky glasses and laughed at his wisdom. One or two of them glanced at her to see how she had responded, but she kept her face blank and moved away to a safer distance; from the moment she had entered the general’s mansion she had felt she was under intense scrutiny. Her beauty, her different beauty, was a handicap, like an ugly birthmark; she was an outsider, the one foreigner in the room. Except for Madame Tolstoy, who had greeted her politely and without surprise.

‘We are pleased that Professor Kambe has brought you, Mrs Cairns. My friend, General Imamaru, is a great admirer of what your late husband did for Japanese art history. When Professor Kambe asked if he might bring you, the general was delighted.’

Natasha had been in a dilemma for several days before hitting on the idea of asking Professor Kambe if he would take her to a reception where she might meet Madame Tolstoy. She had shied away from the idea of going direct to Madame Tolstoy and introducing herself; the woman might just have refused to see her. Alternatively, if Madame Tolstoy had agreed to see her, there would have been no prior opportunity to study her and decide if she was a mother worth claiming. In the present circumstances there was as much decision in accepting a mother as deciding to be one, a sort of reverse pregnancy.

‘Why do you want to meet her?’ Professor Kambe was a widower, in his sixties and susceptible to pretty women. He had studied at Oxford and Heidelberg and had some Western attitudes; but he came of an aristocratic family and if anyone thought critically of him, they did not voice those thoughts. It was he who had brought Keith Cairns to Tokyo University and he had maintained an avuncular interest in Natasha since Keith’s death. ‘She is just another one of General Imamaru’s fancy women.’

‘I understand she is the one.’

‘Well yes, I suppose so. She has lasted longer than most. But you still haven’t told me why you want to meet her?’ He looked at her reproachfully. Though he knew nothing of Natasha’s background, he guessed that, since Keith Cairns had never mentioned it, it was not impeccable. ‘I hope you are not looking for a model.’

Natasha tried to blush, but she had had difficulty doing that even as a child. ‘Of course not, Kambe-san. It’s just curiosity, that’s all. I have heard so much gossip about her …’ Though she had never been disrespectful towards Kambe, she had never been able to practise the ‘respect language’: it always lay on her tongue like a mockery. So she spoke to him as she had always spoken to men, on their level but with just a hint of flattery when it was necessary. Though she knew that a woman’s flattery always put her above the man. ‘And she is like me, an outsider.’

He had smiled understandingly: like a true aristocrat he knew that most of the world was made up of outsiders. ‘Tomorrow night then. General Imamaru is having a reception for a fellow general who has just come back from a glorious retreat somewhere in the Pacific’

She was never sure whether to smile or not at Kambe’s sardonic comments on the military; he came of a family that had supplied generals to the army for several centuries, but he seemed to have an academic’s contempt of them; perhaps that was why he and Keith had always got on so well together. But she was not prepared to take the risk of sharing the joke.

Now, at the reception, she moved round the room towards where Madame Tolstoy was seated with two of the generals’ wives. This was Natasha’s first venture into Tokyo’s high society and she was surprised at the lack of respect for the Palace’s austerity policy. There was none of the depressingly drab dress one saw everywhere else; Professor Kambe had warned her that she did not need to look as if she were on her way to work in a coffin factory. Most of the women wore kimonos, but several of them, the younger ones, were in Western dress. Natasha had been careful about what she wore, choosing one of her more discreet dresses, a peach-coloured silk that threw colour up into her cheeks. She had come in by train from Nayora in the standard dress of baggy trousers and quilted jacket. She had brought the silk gown and her fur coat with her in a large cloth bag and changed at Professor Kambe’s house.

Madame Tolstoy had also been discreet, though she had not been prepared to take discretion too far for fear of being disbelieved: she wore what could only be described as a missionary version of a cheong-sam. It was not too tight, the slit in the leg was not too high: even a priest would only have been aroused to venial sin.

Madame Tolstoy introduced her to the two women, one of whom was the wife of the general who had beaten a glorious retreat in the Pacific. She had the look of a woman who knew what a retreat, glorious or otherwise, was. The other woman, plump and pale as a thick rice ball in her kimono, was the wife of yet another general. Natasha felt like a novice camp follower.

‘Mrs Cairns lives out at Nayora,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘She is so fortunate to be away from Tokyo. She is interned there.’

‘How nice,’ said the first general’s wife and looked as if she wished she might beat a retreat to Nayora.

‘I’d be just as happy here,’ said the plump wife and looked around the large room where they sat. General Imamaru’s mansion had been built for the general’s father by a Japanese apostle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s who had lost his nerve. Cohesiveness seemed to dribble away in corners; solidity and fragility confronted each other like figures in a Hall of Crazy Mirrors. The general had not improved the interior by furnishing it with what appeared to be a furniture album of his travels; some day it might be preserved as a museum of bad taste. The plump wife loved it. ‘I don’t know why you don’t move in here, Madame Tolstoy.’

‘One has to be discreet,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked as coy as only a madame could. ‘General Imamaru prefers me to live in the house across the garden.’

‘Did you furnish the other house yourself?’ said Natasha. ‘I have heard you have beautiful taste.’

‘People are so complimentary,’ said Madame Tolstoy, and looked at her with benign suspicion.

‘I should love to see it.’ Natasha saw the other two women look at her with sudden cool disapproval. She knew she was being forward and disrespectful, but she was speaking to another outsider, not to them. Still, she backtracked, if only for Madame Tolstoy’s sake: ‘That is, if I should not be rudely intruding.’

She had spent the last half hour studying her alleged mother and had decided that she had to know more about her, even at the risk of – what? She had not even begun to contemplate her future with a newly-found mother. But she sensed now that Madame Tolstoy was puzzled and intrigued by her. Could it be that the mother in her had already recognized the daughter?

‘Come to my house later,’ said Madame Tolstoy. ‘General Imamaru wants the ladies to retire early. He and the other gentlemen have matters to discuss.’

Natasha smiled her thanks, bowed to the three older women, though not as low as their position deserved, and moved away. She had never been able to bring herself to descend through the various bows of respect; a slight inclination of the head, more European than Oriental, was as far as she ever went. Though, if ever she met the Emperor, which was as unlikely as meeting God, she knew she would go right to the ground, even if only to save her neck. Having turned her back on the God the nuns had given her, she was still amazed at the reverence the Japanese gave to the Emperor.

She found a seat, a monstrous Victorian chair looted from a house in Hong Kong, and took note of the gathering; after all, she was supposed to be a spy, working for two bosses. She had never been to a reception as top-level as this, not even with Keith. Here were men who ran the country and the war. She recognized, from photos she had studied, Admiral Yonai, who was bigger than she had supposed and who seemed to be the life of the small group surrounding him; he was the Navy minister and had just been appointed assistant prime minister, but he looked as if he had no more worries than running a home for pensioned sailors. She saw others: Admiral Tajiri; the War minister General Sugiyama; Prince Mikasa, a brother of the Emperor: a bomb on this house tonight would be an exploding fuse that would blow out most of the power of Japan. She caught snatches of conversation from the various groups of men and was shocked at the frankness; defeats and retreats were being discussed here as they were never told to the public. She thrilled at the prospect of what she might hear and then pass on to the wireless operators in the Aleutians. But for this evening she had the more immediate, personal problem that had brought her here.

The groups of men began to break up and Professor Kambe came across to her. ‘You have been a success, Natasha. All the men were most complimentary.’

‘I did nothing but stand around.’

‘It was enough. Military men, unless they are using them otherwise, like their women to stand around like regimental runners.’

Natasha glanced around nervously. ‘One of these days, professor, the military men will stand you up against a wall and shoot you.’

‘Possibly. Unless they are too busy avoiding being shot themselves by the Americans.’

‘Are they all as pessimistic as that?’

But Professor Kambe wasn’t going to stand himself up against the wall; he knew when enough was enough, especially in a general’s own house. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about it. Shall we go?’

‘May I be excused, professor? Madame Tolstoy has asked me over to see her house.’

He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Is that wise? You don’t want the gossips painting you with the same brush they’ve used on her.’

‘I shall be careful, Kambe-san.’ She was grateful for his concern for her. With other men in other lands, she would have put a hand on his arm; but not here, not with so many in the room watching them. Such an intimacy would offend, though not Kambe himself. ‘Thank you for bringing me.’

‘Report to me tomorrow.’ He was not a gossip, but he enjoyed hearing it. Like sex, it is one of the pleasures of all classes. ‘And do be careful.’

How else could one be with a probable mother who was an almost total stranger? ‘I shall be.’

A servant took her across the garden to Madame Tolstoy’s house. The garden was large, one of the largest in the Koji-Machi district. Close to the Imperial Palace, which the Americans had evidently decided should not be bombed, General Imamaru’s mansion and the smaller villa of his mistress were as intact as they had been since first built. Water trickled into pools, suggesting tranquillity; the white stones of the paths were raked each day so as not to offend the general’s eye; a gardener worked here all day every day, as if flowers were an essential crop. But even as she walked through the garden, Natasha wondered if the general, from tonight’s conversation, really believed it could all last.

Madame Tolstoy was waiting for her in the villa. The gossip about her taste was true: the rooms were an ideal marriage of comfort and formalism. Madame Tolstoy had learned from her travels, had done her own looting of ideas.

There was a man with her, Colonel Hayashi. Natasha had seen him at the reception, standing in the background, never intruding on any of the groups; she had assumed that he had been an aide to one of the generals. He was tall and muscular, a man who looked as if he would enjoy the physical side of life. But it would not be an extrovert enjoyment: his face would show nothing, even his eyes had a bony look.

‘Colonel Hayashi has been admiring you all evening. He wanted to meet you.’

Dammit, surely she’s not a procuress, too?

But if Colonel Hayashi had designs on her, he did not show them. In a soft yet harsh voice he said, ‘Why haven’t we seen you before, Mrs Cairns?’

‘I am interned out at Nayora. I am allowed only one pass a week to come into Tokyo.’ That was not true: she now had Major Nagata’s promise of a pass any time she wished it. ‘I usually spend the day with friends at the University.’

‘We must see you more often at General Imamaru’s.’ He glanced at Madame Tolstoy, who tilted her head as if to say ‘maybe’. Natasha wondered if he was Madame Tolstoy’s lover; then she further wondered what General Imamaru would think of that. ‘You are a close friend of Professor Kambe’s, Mrs Cairns?’

She hedged on that one, suddenly wondering if he was one of Major Nagata’s superiors from the kempei. But if he were he would not be wearing his present uniform; he was on the General Staff. ‘The professor was a close friend of my husband.’

Hayashi nodded; not understandingly but more as if he appreciated a shrewd noncommittal answer. He gazed steadily at her for a long moment, then abruptly picked up his cap from a nearby table and bowed to both women.

‘I must be going,’ he said and left, going out so quickly and without ceremony that he might have been alone when he had decided to leave.

Thrown off-balance by his abrupt departure, Natasha blurted out, ‘Who is he?’

‘A friend,’ Madame Tolstoy had not even glanced at the door through which Colonel Hayashi had disappeared. She stood very still and composed, the straight lines of the cheong-sam seeming to accentuate her stillness. ‘The point is, Mrs Cairns, who are you?’

It was a frontal attack and it made up Natasha’s mind for her. All evening she had been wondering how she would approach Madame Tolstoy about their relationship. At every opportunity, when she had felt she herself was not being observed, she had looked closely at the other woman. She could see a resemblance to herself: they had been cut from the same fine but strong bone, their lips had the same fullness (‘inviting kisses’, Keith had said of hers), each had a trick of holding her head so that the curve of the neck was gracefully emphasized. Only the eyes were different: Madame Tolstoy’s had more slant to them, they were darker and more calculating. Natasha did not think her own were calculating, but the last thing one ever did was look deeply into one’s own eyes. Or at least she never had, and now she wondered if it had been cowardice, not wanting to see the truth.

‘Madame Tolstoy, did you ever know a Mr Henry Greenway in Shanghai?’

It was as if they had collided, though the older woman did not move. But the impact was there in her face, the eyes were no longer calculating: they had had a calculated guess confirmed. Her lips thinned, then she nodded.

‘You’ve been troubling me all evening. Yes, I knew Henry. You’re his daughter.’

Natasha had had no experience of motherhood or mother love, but she had not expected an answer like that. As if Madame Tolstoy, or Mrs Greenway, or whatever she had called herself in those days, had been no more than a vending machine, delivering a baby like those chocolate machines one found on railway stations. She laughed, though she did not feel in the least humoured.

‘Yes, I’m his daughter. And yours too.’

It only struck Natasha later that, though neither of them wanted the relationship right then, neither of them denied it. Lily Tolstoy was capable of emotion, though for most of her life she had manufactured it as the occasion demanded. But she had never experienced an occasion like this, indeed had never even contemplated that it might arise. She had occasionally thought of the child she had abandoned, but never with a true mother’s regret or grief. But now, if only for the moment, she felt what she had once felt, just as fleetingly, for Henry Greenway.

They had been speaking Japanese, though neither of them was really comfortable in the language. Now abruptly Lily said in Mandarin Chinese, ‘Do you want some tea?’

‘Not if we have to go through the ceremony,’ Natasha replied in the same language. She was amused that her mother should have reverted to her native language, as if it was the tongue she had taught Natasha at her knee. Since Lily had deserted her when she was only three months old, it was hardly likely they had exchanged any intelligible words. ‘Let’s have it English style. As a gesture to Father.’

Lily’s face had been almost masklike; but now she smiled. She liked ironic humour: she wore it as armour, to protect herself against some of the knights who had pursued her. She rang a bell for a servant. ‘English tea it shall be. I believe I have a tin of Earl Grey somewhere.’

She led Natasha into a side room furnished with the proper austerity of a tasteful looter: some French elegance from a banker’s home in Saigon. Only the walls were Japanese: Natasha, who had learned a little from Keith, recognized the two Sanraku prints. It was not a room for a warm reunion, and Natasha was glad.

‘General Imamaru treats you well,’ she said, looking about her.

‘He is charming.’ Never so much as when he was absent. Lily had early recognized the general’s drawbacks, but he was a general and he had wealth. One, not even a high-class mistress, could not ask for everything. ‘Mrs Cairns? That means you were married?’

‘My husband is dead. He worked with Professor Kambe. Father died too, you know. He was killed in 1938. A warlord up in Sikang shot him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ For a moment Lily was indeed sorry; not that she would miss Henry but that he should have died violently. He had never been a violent man. ‘I liked Henry. I just should not have married him. If your husband is dead, what do you live on?’

‘A small pension.’ And, as of this week, an informer’s pay from Major Nagata.

‘You’re very beautiful,’ said Lily, and for a moment felt slightly queasy with a mother’s pride. ‘You could do better than that.’

Natasha had never thought of herself as a whore; consequently, she did not think of herself as a reformed whore. So she did not feel sanctimonious, a consequence of reform. ‘Possibly – do you mind if I call you Mother?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Lily. ‘I’d never get used to it. Call me Lily.’

Natasha didn’t mind the rejection. She was still trying to sort out her feelings. She assumed she would have felt differently had her mother proved to be something like the romantic figure she had dreamed of; she might even have settled for one of the dull, motherly exiles from the Home Counties she had seen in Hong Kong. She could not, however, come to terms with the acceptance of Lily Tolstoy as her mother, though she knew now that it was a fact.

A servant, who must have had water boiling on call, brought in a silver tea service and exquisite bone-china cups and saucers: more loot. The tea was poured, without ceremony, and Lily offered a silver salver of Peek Frean’s biscuits. Henry Greenway would have felt right at home in the family circle.

‘I think I’d rather wait till the end of the war before I start accepting any favours,’ said Natasha. ‘My late husband taught me to take the long view.’

‘You think Japan will lose the war?’ Lily sipped her tea, little finger raised: she was a good secondrate actress.

Natasha took a risk: after all, Lily was her mother. Besides, tomorrow Major Nagata would ask her what she had learned and she would have to give him something for his money. ‘I listened to the men’s conversation this evening. None of them sounded optimistic.’

‘Natasha—’ It was the first time she had called her by name; it suggested she was prepared to be a little more intimate. ‘You probably have guessed what my life has been. Mistresses can never afford to take the long view. It is myopic for one to think one can.’

Natasha munched on a cream wafer; it was stale, but it tasted fresh and sweet to her after the years of wartime rations. ‘So what will you do when the war ends? If Japan loses?’

‘I still have my looks and my talents.’ She had those, but no modesty. ‘American generals, presumably, have mistresses.’

‘Does General Imamaru know how you feel?’ She sipped her tea, one pan of her mind thinking of Keith. He had admired the Japanese style of living, but he had had a Scotsman’s love of strong, sweet tea.

‘Of course not.’ Lily put down her cup and saucer and looked sternly at her daughter. ‘I can understand that curiosity brought you to see me. But what had you in mind to follow? Blackmail?’

‘Mother!’ said Natasha mockingly. She felt suddenly at ease, deciding that she felt no love, not even repressed, for her mother. ‘Of course not. As you say, it was curiosity …’

‘Are you disappointed in me or not?’

‘Ye-es,’ Natasha said slowly; she had had her dreams for so long, if only intermittently. ‘I used to picture you as a Mongolian princess who had run off with a Rumanian oil tycoon. Some day I was going to meet up with you on the French Riviera.’

Lily smiled. ‘How flattering. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you.’

Natasha put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’d better be going. I have a long way to go, out to Nayora.’

For the first time Lily felt the situation was slippery. ‘If we go on seeing each other …’

Natasha wasn’t sure that that was what she wanted; but she had another role to play besides that of spurned daughter. She would never get another opportunity like this to move in the higher circles in Tokyo. She thought not of Major Nagata, but of Keith, who would have jumped at this same opportunity.

‘Perhaps I could be your niece. Would General Imamaru believe that?’

‘General Imamaru makes a pretence of believing anything I tell him.’ She knew her men: she never believed anything they told her. ‘I think he finds it easier, it leaves his mind free for problems of the war. The question is, will the women believe it?’

‘The generals’ wives I met this evening won’t. They’d wonder why you didn’t introduce me as your niece at once.’

‘True. But if General Imamaru accepts you as my niece, then they will have to.’ She had never bothered herself with respectable women’s acceptance of her. ‘Who is there to contradict us?’

No one but Major Nagata and the commandeered Hong Kong police files. ‘As you say – who? Goodnight – Lily.’

‘How are you getting back to Nayora?’

‘By train. The last one goes at 10.30.’

‘I can’t have a niece of mine going all that way at night by train. A moment—’

Five minutes later Natasha was being driven back to Nayora in one of General Imamaru’s two staff cars. The car had to go up a long curving driveway past General Imamaru’s mansion to reach the gates. As it went past the wide steps leading up to the mansion she saw Colonel Hayashi coming down the steps with General Imamaru. Their heads were close together and Hayashi seemed to be doing the talking. She wondered if he was telling the general about her.

The driver, fortunately, was not talkative. He sat up front as isolated from her as he would have been had he been driving General Imamaru; she was glad that army drivers knew their place. She had him detour to Kambe’s house, where without disturbing the professor, she collected the cloth bag containing her everyday clothes. She did not, however, change into them: that would be a too immediate drop from being Madame Tolstoy’s ‘niece’.

She lay back in the car, exhausted by emotion and the evening. Now, belatedly, she felt a deep disappointment at meeting Lily Tolstoy; she had really hoped for someone more like a mother. She was not disgusted at her mother’s profession; she knew as well as anyone that in the Orient of the Twenties and Thirties any woman of mixed blood had to make her way as best she could; flexible morals only improved the opportunities. She was, however, deeply disappointed (not hurt: that would have implied some sudden love on her own part) that Lily had shown no affection for her at all. She was not a sprat, to deserve such a cold fish of a mother.

3

Tom Okada had had great difficulty in persuading the servant woman to allow him into the villa. To begin with, he was not accustomed to dealing with servants. The Okada household in Gardena, California, had had a cook and a woman who came in every day to do the chores; but he had never had to assert any authority over them and he had looked on them as part of the family. When he had graduated from his law studies at UCLA he had gone into the office of the nursery and run the business side for his father; the nursery by then had forty employees but it had always been his father who had given the orders. Faced this evening with a tiny servant, and a woman at that, as obdurate as a career army sergeant, he had felt for a while that he was fighting a losing battle. Then he had said, in a moment of inspiration, that he had been a student of Professor Cairns.

Yuri had eyed him suspiciously, but at least she had stopped shaking her head. ‘Then why do you wish to see Mrs Cairns?’

‘I have some information for her.’

Ever since the appearance of Major Nagata, Yuri had been doubly wary. Was this good-looking young man also from the kempei?

‘Where have you come from?’

‘A long way.’

The distance had been nothing compared to distances in America; but he had had to change trains twice, waiting a long time in each case. Once he had had to walk six miles; the railroad tracks had been bombed out. As he had got further down out of the mountains he had seen more and more evidence of the American bombing; the war was being brought right home to the Japanese. He was tired and hungry and it was after dark before he reached Nayora.

‘I haven’t eaten since midday,’ he said.

Yuri was torn between suspicion of the stranger and the thought of offending the ghost of Cairns-san, the one man she had come close to loving. At last she stood aside and gestured for the stranger to come into the villa. Later, she gave him supper, then went out on to the verandah to wait for Natasha’s return, wrapping herself in two blankets against the cold. Once she crept into the house and saw the young man fast asleep on a couch. She decided that, in sleep at least, he looked honest.

Okada woke when he heard the car drive up; men he heard the voices out on the verandah. He had been exhausted when he had fallen asleep; he had had no more caution left than he had energy. If the woman servant had wanted to betray him, she could easily have done so; now, as he came awake, he knew he would have to be more careful in future. From now on trust might be an extravagant luxury.

He stood up, tensing as the door opened. When only the two women came in, he almost sighed with relief. There was only one lamp in the room, a small green-shaded table lamp in a corner; it threw enough illumination for him to see that the girl standing beside the servant woman was beautiful. Nobody in Intelligence at San Diego had told him what Mrs Cairns looked like; for some reason he had expected her to be older, tougher-looking, a woman whose mixed blood would have coarsened her looks. He had his own prejudices.

‘Are you Mrs Cairns?’ he said in Japanese.

‘Yes. Who are you?’ Natasha at once had guessed who he was, though she had not expected him so soon. She saw his questioning look at Yuri and she nodded reassuringly: ‘I trust Yuri. I think you can too.’

‘I’m Joshua. You should have been expecting me.’ He still had one eye on the doorway, waiting for – soldiers? police? – to come bursting through. The day-long trip had been only prologue, from now on the real danger began.

‘I have been.’ She turned to Yuri. ‘You may go to bed now, Yuri.’

‘Will you be all right?’ With him: she didn’t say it but she nodded her head suspiciously at Okada.

‘I’ll call you if I’m not. Take a knife to bed with you.’

Yuri didn’t think that was much of a joke; she snorted and backed out of the room, not respectfully but watchfully. Okada said, ‘She doesn’t trust me.’

‘She’s never trusted any man. Except my late husband.’

‘They never mentioned her when they briefed me. They didn’t tell me much about you.’

‘What would they know about me, only that my husband had recommended me?’ They were treading warily through the bramble-bush of suspicion and ignorance of each other. Natasha knew that she had not been able to send much information of value on her monthly radio transmissions; that feeling of inadequacy and the danger she was exposing herself to had weighed heavily on her. She welcomed someone who would share the burden with her, but she was not going to accept him blindly.

Okada, for his part, had been put off by Natasha’s beauty. He was not averse to women and particularly beautiful women; but he had preferred them in the plural, taken singly only for a night or two and never with any commitment. But he would have to commit himself to this woman: it would be an affair, even if there was no romance to it. He was wary of her: a girl as beautiful and composed as this one must have received plenty of offers of commitment. She had a lot to sell besides secrets.

‘They told me nothing about you,’ she said. She had been fin looking at him objectively, something she had always done ever since she had become aware of men. He was of medium height but tall for a Japanese, and muscular. He had a strong face, good-looking but for the dark suspicion in his eyes.

They had sat down opposite each other. The room, he had observed earlier, was furnished in Western style; which, for almost trivial reasons, made him for the moment feel more comfortable; he wanted to come back to Japan, to the style of living, a step at a time. Natasha, suddenly deciding the ice needed cracking, got up, went to a big ugly cabinet and came back with two drinks.

‘Scotch whisky, the last of my husband’s stock.’ She took it for granted that he drank liquor; all the men she had known had been drinkers. ‘Now tell me about you.’

But Embury and particularly Irvine had told him that an agent in the field should never know much about his or her control. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take me at face value. All I can tell you is that I’m a Nisei, a Japanese-American. For this mission –’ he was still awkward with the jargon’ – I’m supposed to have come from Saipan, where I was an under-manager at a sawmill. You’ll report to me once a week – I may or may not have information for you to transmit. You’ll be transmitting every week from now on, instead of monthly.’

‘That increases the risk.’ She didn’t feel comfortable with the thought. Then, remembering Yuri’s comment, she said, ‘I’m not being paid for this.’

He caught the mercenary note in her voice. ‘They didn’t say anything about that. Was your husband paid?’

‘I don’t know. But with him it was different – he was a patriot.’ She had never been sure that he was; he had seemed to have more love for Japan than for Scotland. ‘It’s very difficult trying to live without money.’

‘You came home by car. Who paid for that?’ The whisky, served without ice, hadn’t broken any.

‘It was a friend’s.’ She decided she wouldn’t tell him about her mother, not yet.

‘You’re well dressed, too. A fur coat.’ He had forgotten how cold an unheated house could be.

She put her glass down and said sharply, ‘I don’t have to answer to you like some servant.’

He had been studying her carefully. The male in him appreciated her looks; but he was unaccustomed to women of mixed blood. The Japanese he had known in California had been a tightly knit community; even amongst the whites he had known at school and university he could not remember any who had had any Negro or Oriental blood in them. He had grown up in a society that believed that any relationship between races had to be promiscuous and any child, especially a girl, born of that relationship would also be promiscuous. And being promiscuous, in that way of thinking, meant having less regard for other values. He would have to adapt to her and, tired as he was, that made him angry.

‘You can raise the point with them in your next broadcast. I’ve got only enough to keep myself, till I get a job.’

‘What are you going to do? Maybe I can help,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I have contacts at the university.’

He shook his head. ‘No. If you were picked up and questioned, you would know where I could be found. It’s better for both of us if you can’t get in touch with me. I’ll contact you each week.’

‘You’re not going to trust me, are you? What if I have something important to tell you in a hurry?’

He considered that, going over all the instructions Irvine, the experienced control, had given him. ‘We’ll settle on a mail drop, somewhere where you can leave a message for me. Or I can leave one for you, if I need you in a hurry. But we can’t do that till I know my way around.’

‘Will you stay around here?’

‘No. It’ll be easier to lose myself in Tokyo.’ He could risk telling her that. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m supposed to ask you a lot of questions, but I’m too tired. What time does the first train leave Nayora in the morning?’

‘There’s one comes through from Shizuoka at 7.15, if it’s on time. They’re not always on time these days, because of the bombings.’

‘I’ll get out of your house before daylight and go up to the station. I’ll be in touch with you, where to meet me. Do you have a phone?’

‘It was disconnected when we were interned.’ She began to envy him. ‘You seem to have had an easy war in America. Expecting the trains to run on time, telephones to work …’

He smiled, a tiny crack in the ice between them; she was quick to notice that with the smile his face changed, his eyes became livelier. ‘Score one to you. Now may I get some sleep?’

She led him upstairs to one of the bedrooms, made up a bed for him and left him. ‘I’ll set an alarm to wake me at five,’ she said. ‘It’s still dark then.’

‘There’s no need for that—’

‘Yes, there is. You look worn out – if you’re not wakened, you’ll sleep right through to midday. Yuri will get up with me. She’ll see that you have something to eat before you leave. It won’t be an American breakfast, but it may be a long time before you have another one of those.’ Then she said in English, ‘Goodnight, Mr Joshua.’

‘Goodnight,’ he said in the same tongue. He took a risk, chipping away further at the ice: ‘My name is Okada. Tamezo Okada.’

She smiled at him from the doorway. ‘That could be a trap, speaking in English so carelessly. I think you are like me, Mr Okada. Not a very experienced spy.’

She closed the door, leaving him to sleep on that. He fell asleep wondering how long he would survive. He did not wonder about her: she looked a survivor, if ever he’d seen one.

4

Natasha lay in her own bed, wrapped in some wondering of her own. She had no doubt that Tamezo Okada was who he claimed to be; his arrival, however, had put sudden pressure on her, and, just as suddenly, she wondered if she could cope with it. Up till now she had been doing little more than playing at being a spy; keeping the transmitter oiled, as it were. From here on, if there was to be a transmission a week, it was obvious that the game was to be played seriously. She tried to think how Keith would have reacted; then knew he would have welcomed the pressure. But then he had been so much more experienced at the game than herself – or Tamezo Okada. She suddenly longed for the comfort of Keith’s arms; but it was too late. She fell asleep, making love in her memory, which, like the real thing, is often disappointing.

In the morning she decided to tell Okada about Major Nagata but not about her mother: some relationships were, well, not sacred but suspicious. ‘Major Nagata is working for himself more than for the kempei.’

‘Jesus!’ said Okada, thinking English so early in the morning. ‘Does he suspect you’re an agent for us?’

‘I don’t think so. But I have to report to him what I learned last night at General Imamaru’s.’

Okada looked up from his plate of rice and cold fish. ‘You were at a general’s place? You move in high circles.’

‘A friend of my husband’s from the university took me. Professor Kambe.’ She shook her head before he could ask the question: ‘No, we are not lovers or anything like that. He’s an old man.’ Anyone over fifty was an old man to her; Keith had just escaped the description, dotage had been only four years away when he had died. ‘He knows everyone in high circles, as you call it.’

‘Have you been using him to get information?’

‘The professor? No. Last night was the first time he’d taken me to a reception like that.’

He felt some excitement for the job now: with she and Minato both giving him information, the weekly transmission should raise some excitement back in San Diego, too. At the same time he realized that he would probably be transmitting no information of his own, that while Mrs Cairns and Minato moved in high circles, he’d be no more than the anonymous coach calling the signals. One hidden away in very low circles.

‘Is Nagata having you watched?’

‘I don’t know. If he’s working for himself, I shouldn’t think so.’

‘What makes you think he’s working for himself?’

‘Intuition.’ She had done it for herself for so long.

He hadn’t expected complications so soon. ‘Well, we’ll have to take a risk. We’ve got to meet at least once again, so that we can arrange the mail drop. The trouble is, you’re conspicuous. Your looks, I mean.’

She was so accustomed to compliments that she took his remark as another one; and was surprised. ‘Thank you.’

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I meant you’re different. I’d pass in a crowd more easily than you would.’

She was rebuffed; but she saw his point. ‘We’d better meet at night then. It will have to be an obvious place, till you get to know Tokyo better. Come to the university. There’s a small garden next to the Art Department. There’s no one in the Department now except some elderly gentlemen, like Professor Kambe, and they won’t be there at night.’

They settled on a meeting at nine o’clock three nights hence. Then it was time for him to leave for the station. He held out his hand and she took it.

‘Don’t do that again,’ she said, ‘not in Japan. Good luck.’

He smiled, embarrassed at the small mistakes he was continuing to make. ‘I hope we can work well together.’

This morning she liked him, despite his wariness of her. Though she didn’t recognize it, she had the talent all good women spies should have: an ability to suffer men. ‘I hope so, too.’

She let him out the side door of the house and he disappeared into the morning darkness.

Three hours later Major Nagata called on her again. His visit was prompted more by the desire to see her again as a woman than as one of his operatives. But she gave him a report on last night’s reception at General Imamaru’s and he was so pleased with it he was tempted to give her a bonus. But habit held him back: charity is not part of a secret policeman’s make-up.

‘And how was your mother?’

‘Maternal,’ she said and left it at that. After all, as a Japanese, he should appreciate there were some matters that were ‘family’.

Chapter Three

1

It took Kenji Minato only five weeks to reach home. None of the contacts along the route wanted to hold him longer than was necessary. Those outside Japan and Germany knew how badly the war was going; they were planning escape routes of their own. Minato had managed to limp out of the desert to a dirt road where he had been picked up by a Mexican farmer who had charged him fifty dollars to drive him the two hundred miles to Hermosillo. It was almost as much as the farmer would earn in six months and he was not going to ask any questions of an enemy who was willing to pay so much. Mexico was officially at war with Japan, but not so the farmer.

Minato had gone on by bus to Mexico City and from there by plane to Caracas. There he had been put aboard a Swedish freighter that was bound for Lisbon. From the Portuguese capital he had been flown to Berne with a mixed bag of diplomats, couriers, businessmen and an exiled king’s mistress going shopping in Zurich. There were two other Japanese on the flight, but they ignored him; he was not sure whether they knew who he was or whether they considered him socially inferior. He had been given a new wardrobe in Mexico City, but it was cheap and ill-fitting, as if spies on the run should not expect to be well-dressed. He longed to be back in naval uniform.

From Berne he travelled by no less than seven trains to Istanbul. On each leg of the journey he met other Japanese; these were more sociable, though none of them told him what their jobs were and he told them nothing of himself. But the number of Japanese travelling told him what he already knew, that the war was not going well. His fellow-travellers had a look of defeat about them.

He went all the way from Istanbul to Tokyo by plane, through Tashkent, Alma Ata: it was strange to see that the Russians were not yet at war with Japan. He stopped in Peking for two days when he had to wait for a seat on a plane, sleeping at the military airdrome and in his waking hours watching the military brass, none of them looking happy or victorious, trooping aboard the aircraft. He was closer to home than he had been in six years and suddenly he was more depressed than he had been in all that time. When he finally flew in over the huge bronze statue of Buddha at Kamakura and landed at Atsugi air base he felt it was more than just the end of a journey.

He was met by Lieutenants Sagawa and Nakasone. At the naval academy they had been close friends; but now they seemed like strangers. They bowed formally to him and he to them; then on an impulse he put out hands to both of them. They welcomed the intimacy, as if they had wanted proof that he had not changed. Did they know how one could be so insidiously corrupted in America?

‘You must be glad to be back.’ Haruo Sagawa hadn’t changed, Minato decided. He still looked as he always had, a man so afraid of being thought vulgar that he had gone to the other extreme, primness. He had a round soft face and a mouth that was continually pursed. He still sounded as if he were preaching: ‘There is no place like one’s own country.’

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