Allegiance (47 page)

He takes my card and vanishes. For five minutes I study the columns, the balcony, the thick wooden door. Then the man returns. “Mr. Patterson is not receiving callers.”

“You have my card if he changes his mind,” I say.

“Ah,” he says. “I forgot.” He extends his hand and I take what he offers. It is my card. I look at it dumbly. “Mr. Patterson is not accepting cards.”

I let him shut the door on me without another word. If Patterson stonewalls, what can I do? Turn him over to Hoover, I guess. Or go talk to a man of honor.

• • • • 

Colonel Richards is on the phone when I enter his office, finishing a joke. “And she says, ‘When I came in here, I wasn't.' ” He laughs. Then he catches sight of me and his face changes. “Call you right back.”

“So, Bill,” I say.

“What?”

“You hear about what happened in Tule Lake?”

“Yes.”

“For people who aren't trying to kill me, your friends used an awful lot of bullets.”

He shakes his head. “That wasn't them.”

“Because they would have told you? No offense, but I don't think you're getting quite the whole story here. I think Joe and Cissy have a sideline you don't know about.” He frowns at the names and I continue. “They're using you, Bill. They're making a fool of you.”

“A fool?” I have surprised him, but he is gathering himself. “Almost two hundred years ago, some men dressed themselves as Indians and threw tea into Boston Harbor. They were fools, surely. They deserved the scorn of people like you. But everything we are today came from their folly.”

“This isn't the tea party, Bill.” I take the certificate Harry Nakamura gave me from my pocket. “It's worthless stock being traded for Japanese land. That's what they didn't want me to find out about. That's why they were shooting at me.” I spread the certificate on his desk. “And it's Joe Patterson's stock.”

Richards looks down. “That railroad was publicly held. Anyone could own its shares.”

“And they'd just decide to use them to fool people into signing away their land? That's a bit of a coincidence, don't you think?”

“The world is full of surprises.”

I lean forward. “Listen, Bill. I know what's going on. You put the clerks in and they didn't affect the cases. All that effort for nothing. And someone thought, why should it be wasted? Clerks can do other things, if they're loyal to you. Press the Court to hear business cases. Tell you how they'll come out so you can buy stock. That's what Gene Gressman was figuring out. That's why they killed him. Joe and Cissy used you. They're making money off it, and you're their dupe.”

“I don't think so.” But he looks troubled.

“I'm going to prove it. If I live long enough. You said they didn't want to hurt me, and maybe they didn't. Not then. But they don't want to get found out, either, and if I keep coming after them, I'm pretty sure how it's going to end. Is that what your principles demand?”

Richards blinks at me. What I have said is true, I think. That is how Miller came to be shooting at an official of his own government. One step led to another; each attempt to cover up created a new crime. Swindling the detainees out of their land, putting a loyal man on the list for removal, hitting me from behind, killing us both. The stakes increased on their own; he just kept pace. “No one is going to kill you,” Richards says at last. “But I will make some calls.”

I HAVE ALMOST
stopped thinking of the office as belonging to James Rowe. Familiarity has made it mine. My chairs, my desk, my window looking out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. My boxes of renunciation forms, my letter of resignation awaiting a signature. I call down to the mailroom for a trolley and take the boxes to Biddle's office myself. He watches me wheel them in.

“What are these?”

“The renunciation forms.”

He draws in his breath. It is not a gasp, more the preparation for a sigh. “How many?”

“Fifty-five hundred or so.”

“We only got five thousand applications here.” There is surprise in his voice, and something like reproach.

“There were more out there. Once the hearing teams arrived, they stopped mailing them in.”

“Cash,” he says. “You were supposed to stop it.”

“I did everything I could.” I remember Kinzo Wakayama blinking against my light, Skousen holding the gun above his head. “Maybe more than I should have.”

Biddle lifts the cover off one of the boxes. He raises a handful of forms and lets them slide down over his fingers. He leans back in his chair and looks at me. Now it is time for the sigh.

“Then don't approve them,” I say. “They still need your signature.”

“Are they voluntary?”

“Voluntary? They said the right words. They memorized the answers. They feared for their lives.”

Biddle collects himself. “The law is clear.” I can almost see it, wrapping around his shoulders, covering him head to toe. He is the Attorney General again, not a worried man hiding his bald spot. “If they're voluntary, I have to sign.”

He is uncapping a pen as I leave. Soon the letters will go out. I imagine them on their way to California, a fleet of paper upon the land.
Your application for renunciation has been approved by the Attorney General.
To Masaaki Kuwabara, whose father hid in the sugarcane. To Joe Imihara, whose mother was a picture bride. She crossed the Pacific in an envelope, paper made flesh by years of toil.
You are no longer a citizen of the United States.
The parents could never be Americans, but the children might be. Now another envelope comes to take that away, a two-cent stamp to ship them all beyond the sea.
Nor are you entitled to any of the rights and privileges of such citizenship.
To Pat Noguchi, who said he forgave me.

I sit in my office and spend the rest of the day waiting to hear from Richards. Then I go to my apartment and wait some more.

• • • • 

I have gone to bed resigning myself to the fact that there will be no news today when the doorman buzzes. “A young lady here to see you,” he says, though his tone implies pretty clearly that no one deserving of that appellation would arrive alone so late at night.

Clara toys distractedly with objects on my bookshelf. “Is this a trophy?”

“Take your coat off,” I say.

She looks full at me for the first time, and I can see she's been crying. “Douglas fired me.”

“What? Why?”

“He figured out I was talking to you.”

I feel an emptiness open in my chest, coupled with a strange downward pull in my throat. I think,
This is my heart sinking.
The phrase has never been more vivid to me. “How?”

Clara shrugs. “I don't know.” She takes off her coat and sits on the coach, hugging it to her chest. “I think someone told him. He went out this evening and then he burst back in. I was working late. He'd been drinking. He told me he couldn't employ anyone who'd go behind his back.”

“Oh, no,” I say. I take a seat beside her. “Oh, no.” Involuntarily, my hand goes over my mouth. Some part of me is hoping this is a coincidence, random accident rather than the rebound of my attempts at protection. Some selfish part, since that makes it no better for anyone but me.

“What?” Clara asks. And the phone rings.

I answer.

“So,” says Clyde Tolson. “How's your friend?”

“You've gone white,” Clara tells me. “What's happening?”

“We know things about you, too,” says Tolson. “We know you met with Horsky. We know what you told him. Would you like Francis Biddle to learn that?”

“I'd like you to screw yourself.”

“One of the few disappointments in your young life, I'm afraid. There's someone else there I want to talk to.”

I look to the side. “She doesn't want to talk to you.”

Clara gestures, her hand a white moth in the dark.

“I think she does,” says Tolson. “Put her on.” I pass Clara the phone. She listens for a moment and hangs up. We look at each other.

“I made this happen,” I say. “It's my fault. Hoover wanted me to do something for him, and I wouldn't. And so he talked to Douglas, to show me he could reach us.” She says nothing. “Clyde Tolson threatened you, didn't he?”

She nods, tight-lipped.

“With what?”

A shake of the head. “What does Hoover want you to do?”

“To tell him something,” I say.

“To give him names?”

“Yes.”

“People who will be under his power?”

“Yes.”

“You cannot do that.”

“They're bad people,” I say. “The people who killed Gene and John Hall.” I explain what I have figured out, Joe and Cissy running their side project, committing murders to cover it up. “They should be punished.”

“They should be prosecuted,” Clara says. “But you don't think Hoover would do that.”

“There's nothing that would stand up in court if he wanted to charge them. And they're powerful. He'd see them as prizes, probably, that he could keep under his thumb. Just use the information to make them do things for him.”

She shakes her head. “Then you cannot.”

“Look,” I say. “Hoover can't do anything to me. Biddle agrees with me about the evacuation. But I want to protect you.”

“By hurting Joe and Cissy?”

“I don't care how. That's not the point. But I'm not going to lose sleep over what happens to them. They're bad people. I'm—”

“The good guy?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” The lights are coming up in her eyes. “Tell me how you sacrifice yourself for the innocent, I will agree that makes you good. But tell me how willing you are to hurt others for my sake, in my name? No. That does not make you good.”

“Look, I would be happy to suffer myself if it helped you.”

“But sacrificing others is the only way.”

“I don't see any other.”

She looks at me, quiet and beautiful. “No one ever does.”

“This isn't a game,” I continue. “We don't know what he'll do next.”

“Oh, I know.”

“What?”

“He will tell you something. About me.”

I am puzzled. Miller found something, perhaps, but what? “What could he tell me?” She says nothing. “I know your circumstances are not mine.”

“My circumstances,” says Clara, and in her voice is a hint of that early disdain, the tone in which she spoke of malt shops and movies. “This is not a circumstance.”

“What is it?”

Clara produces a mirror and compact from her handbag. She inspects her reflection and dabs at her face with a handkerchief. “I appreciate that you are trying to do the right thing.”

“So is everyone.”

“No, they're not. Don't be silly.” She gives a last look in the mirror and tries a smile. “You see, most things can be fixed.”

“What would Hoover tell me?”

“Do you have anything to drink? Oh, don't look around for a bell to ring. You must have a bottle of some sort.”

“There's whiskey.”

“That's fine.”

I get two glasses from the kitchen, a bottle from the bar. “Here's how,” says Clara. She coughs on the drink, tears starting.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “I think I am. And now I will tell you something. I will solve a mystery for you.”

“What?”

“Why I went to Dupont Circle.”

“Why did you?”

“It is closer to the Y than you think.”

“I don't understand.”

“Not the 17
^th
street Y. The YWHA.” She reaches a hand inside her blouse, taking hold of the golden chain around her neck. A Star of David glints at her fingertips. “Wasserman,” she says. “Before Watson.”

Tolson's smile makes sense now. “That's what Hoover would tell me? So what? It doesn't matter.”

Clara takes another drink and blinks slowly. “You are sweet to say that. But it is a luxury to think so. A luxury not everyone can afford.”

I remember the empty shoes in the photograph Wechsler pushed at me. “I can afford it. We can.”

Clara leans back. Her hair is in her face. “I will not argue with you now. I am tired and the whiskey is on your side.”

I wait, but she says nothing more. Her eyelids flutter half-closed. “Do you
want to stay here?” I ask. “I just mean I don't want to send you home like this. I swear my intentions are pure.”

“You still think that men seduce women,” says Clara. She opens her multicolored eyes, and suddenly she no longer looks tired. “Poor boy.”

It is not like it was with Suzanne. There is no suspension, no whispered prayer for silk to stop my fall. There is only the falling, and it goes on and on, in fierce silence and sharp bursts of breath. Clara twines her fingers in mine, closes her eyes and says my name. In the morning, the pillow I hold smells of lilac and she is gone.

THE LIGHT OF
a March morning spills across my bed. I open my eyes and blink at the ceiling. Then I turn my head to the side. Under the sun, red and gold lightning flashes within the dark storm cloud of Clara's hair. Her eyelids flutter. Still asleep, she flings out her arm, searching for something, and I move aside to let her seek until I realize it's me she wants. She takes my shoulder and pulls herself closer, making a small satisfied noise in her throat. Her breath brushes my face. Then, as though the proximity has awakened her, she opens those rainbow eyes.

I should be used to this, but I am not. Her shoulders in the morning light, her hair across the pillow. Her eyes looking into mine. Months ago, with Tule Lake and
Korematsu
still fresh in my mind, I came down with a fever. I lay awake all night, burning with sickness, and as I lay there I heard her talking. In her sleep she said terrible things. She would not come again. I had failed; I was on the wrong side; I had done nothing to help those who needed me.