PART FOUR

Chapter One

Ottawa, 1959

Emmett lay beside Suzanne in early sunlight. She was awake, turned away from him, he could hear her swallow, could feel her thinking. Crossways at the foot of their bed with its white cotton sheets lay Lenore. Skinny, tanned Lenore, wearing light white cotton pyjamas, lifted one narrow foot to scratch a mosquito bite on her ankle, then replaced the foot so she was lying straight, assembled, taut as a sapling.

He remembered a lunch hour in a coffee shop many years ago in Japan, watching, fascinated by a young office worker who sat bolt upright with a full cup of cold coffee clutched in his hand, sound asleep. Buses, trains, park benches were always occupied by Japanese men in white shirts and black suits, briefcases on their laps, upright, sleeping deeply, and women in housedresses with shopping bags, not dozing — sleeping, soundly sleeping. The Japanese are superb at sleeping in public, their jaws closed, chins raised, no drooling. Beneficiary of the dream.

But Lennie would not sleep; something in her refused it. Emmett thought of this as an economy: like a ledger, it balanced — someone else must have all the dreaming because she had none. And again he remembered, today is Lenore’s seventh birthday. How many hours had Lennie now been awake? He did some math in his head.

Lennie had been awake for 58,400 hours and she was only seven years old.

East-facing bedroom, sunrise. The three of them on a sunny cloud. “Happy Birthday, Lennie,” he said. He could hear her receive this, heard her tip her head back against the sheets so her throat was exposed, her narrow chest raised by her wing-like shoulder blades, her immeasurable quivering, a fine filament. Suzanne rolled over and sat up, golden hair tumbling. She reached and stroked Lennie’s skinny arm. “Happy birthday, baby,” she said.

Lennie smiled without showing her teeth. Something of a young monk, he thought. A Buddhist smile of patient suffering, though he didn’t think that she was in any physical pain. She likely hadn’t closed her eyes all night.

 

Late last night, on a street near home, Emmett had been out walking under the streetlights, the fragrant leafy trees, hearing only the quiet mallet of his own footsteps. He rounded the corner and saw his house, the table lamps lighting his living room. His legs ached. Exhaustion made him feel shy; he just wanted to go to bed.

His front door was unlocked. The entrance and hallway, the stairway, all were in darkness but for light cast from the living room. He heard Suzanne speaking quietly and seriously, one sentence levelled after another. Her seriousness, the adult, sober containment of a situation, it was dry and sexless and made him feel separate, critical of her. He entered the living room in expectation of some difficulty he’d have to dispatch without losing his temper.

He was physically surprised when he saw her. As if his body had forgotten her. Her legs were curled beneath her skirt. She saw him and stopped speaking; she put her hand down on the cushion and leaned toward him. She was pale, without lipstick.

A man was seated in the armchair partially hidden by the entrance from the hall where Emmett now stood. Emmett saw the crossed legs, a pair of fine umber leather loafers; he noticed the socks, the expensive summer wool of the trousers, saw the man’s wrists on the arm of the chair, the hands framed by white shirt cuffs with bloodstone cufflinks, and he entered the room.

John Norfield lifted his face, a half-smile, the wide mouth and finely defined jaw. “Hello, Emmett. It’s been far too long.” Emmett took John’s hand and pulled him up into an embrace, saying his name.

They held each other, and when they pulled apart, Emmett said, “My god, it’s good to see you,” and, shaken, turned to sit beside Suzanne. The drapes weren’t fully drawn and the black window reflected back their shapes. John might have been followed. Emmett returned to close the curtains. Lowering his voice, he said, “Our daughter’s a light sleeper,” and indicated the dark stairway leading to the second floor.

John lit a cigarette. There was a butt in the ashtray beside his chair. He’d been here long enough to smoke one cigarette. He looked older — not as an aged, declining man, but more defined, the narrowing destination of oneself. He wore his hair differently, slicked back behind his ears, parted in a clean line — he must use a comb to make such a definite part in his hair — and the tendons on his neck showed like wires sustaining his handsome head. His face was longer, a longer space between his nose and his lips. He held the cigarette close to his palm so his hand masked his mouth when he drew smoke. “It’s been ten years,” he said.

For some reason, he said this as if it were a lie, though Emmett knew that was correct, it had been ten years — or close enough, nine and a half. Winter of 1950. It was now June 1959. You’d think a man like Norfield would lie easily, but he didn’t and he never had, in Emmett’s knowledge of him. There was always something voluptuous about the way John spoke a falsehood. Emmett heard the lush tone and glanced at Suzanne to see what she would make of it. Suzanne was focused on John, reading him eagerly. Emmett asked him if he’d like a drink. “No thanks.” Coffee?

John crushed his cigarette out in his ashtray, no. “I was held up with some business tonight, here in town. I meant to drop by earlier. Now it’s late, isn’t it.” He spoke loudly, despite the light sleeper up the darkened stairs.

“What business?” Emmett murmured. Then he announced, “I’m going to have a drink.” On his way to the liquor cabinet in the dining room, “Change your mind?” Now he was forgetting to keep his voice down. He poured himself whisky and drank it, poured more, then returned, glass in hand. “I want to ask you where you’ve been.”

“Sure.” Then John said nothing. That familiar insincerity.

Suzanne gave a slight gasp and a giggle. She began to trace figure eights on her bare calf, her skirt pulled aside for this purpose.

To John’s right, on the narrow wall beside his chair, was one of the stylish photographs that Suzanne had taken of him: Norfield wearing a dark suit, seated in a chrome chair, cigarette smoke obscuring his unsmiling face, jazz cool. John twisted his neck to see it, quickly turned away. The difference the years had made. He had less confidence, or less hope. Emmett would never then have described John Norfield as hopeful; only in retrospect did he seem once to have been so.

Emmett tried again, tentatively, “Of course you’ll understand, we wonder where you’ve been.”

“Not wise.”

“That’s all right,” Suzanne said soothingly, “you don’t have to say.”

The way John looked at her — as if tantalized by an offer he couldn’t accept. He confessed dryly, without self-pity, “They looked after me quite well, considering that I was just a courier, a go-between.”

Suzanne, almost in a whisper: “The Russians?”

John winced. Emmett had seen him wince that way before; John disliked melodrama, even coming from Suzanne. He lit another cigarette, speaking with the cigarette in his mouth, “Is it quite safe to talk here?”

Emmett said, “Sure.”

“Not bugged?”

Emmett loosened his black necktie and said, “No.”

“You sure?” John smiled. “I haven’t had a candid conversation in a quiet room for — well, for a long time.”

“Of course,” Suzanne said.

“You seem well, Emmett,” John observed with just a trace of resentment. “The investigation didn’t put you off your game?”

“You know about the investigation?”

Suzanne made a small choking sound, her confession.

“Things going well?” John meant in the aftermath.

“Yes,” Suzanne answered on his behalf, “very well.”

“I’m in the trade end of things, if that’s what you mean,” said Emmett. “Bauxite alumina, for one thing.”

“In Jamaica,” Suzanne added with renewed or remembered loyalty. “And cod in Cuba.”

John stared hard at Emmett, a quick take, and said, “Not anymore, to Cuba, I would imagine.”

“Not at the moment.”

“Still,” John said, speculating, “must be interesting to get close to a real revolution.”

“The Caribbean isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I joined External.”

John let cigarette smoke drift across his face. “What did you have in mind,” he asked languidly, “when you joined External?”

“Asia.” Emmett went to refill his glass. “Do you have any news of Leonard Fischer?”

“I believe he’s been sent northeast, to a village there. He tried to leave Russia, you know. He doesn’t have a passport, no papers. Not even Hungarian. Everything burned in the war, of course. It’s made him unpopular everywhere.”

Emmett, in his exhaustion, imagined that he himself had set fire to Leonard’s passport by dropping the bombs that spilled the fire. He took a drink and asked, “Is Leonard safe?”

John gave a nearly imperceptible shake of the head. “His lungs trouble him very much. Alas.” And there it was — the University of Toronto accent, fake Brit. “Russia isn’t so friendly to Jews, as it turns out.”

John was very ill, Emmett saw that clearly now, and the love he felt for this man tasted bitter, returning like an addiction he thought he’d overcome. John fumbled to put his cigarettes inside his suit jacket, standing shakily in a suit shinier, shabbier than at first sight. He looked feeble and uncertain; his eyes were continually drawn toward the darkened stairs.

Suzanne asked, “Do you need a place to stay tonight?”

Emmett would never know how John might have responded to this proposal because now John was staring hard toward the staircase. He turned, and there was Lenore, seated on the bottom step in her white pyjamas, looking much longer than a child only seven years old, her bare feet on the cold floor.

John’s slurred liar’s voice. “Oh, hello,” he said.

“Hello.” Lenore mimicked him, matching John’s mild insolence.

Suzanne rushed forward so all three adults, smelling of cigarettes and liquor and Suzanne’s tired Chanel, stood casting their shadows into the hall and onto Lennie in her white pyjamas.

Suzanne nervously said, “Hello, darling.”

Emmett made a move toward Lennie, but John beat him to it, going down on one knee before her. Lennie received him, neutral, but also interested and flattered, as if by her first suitor. “Do you know who I am?” John asked her.

Lennie nodded yes.

“Really. You’re a very bright little girl.”

“You’re the man in the photographs.”

“That’s right.”

When Lennie stood, she was almost at John’s shoulder. He leaned toward her. Perhaps resisting the impulse to embrace her, his hands hovered, withdrew. She walked, waif-like, with him following in her wake, and surveyed the few portraits in their discrete positions through the main floor of the house. At each stop, John stood close to her. They made the rounds in silence so complete, Emmett could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock.

Suzanne finally protested, “Lennie, it’s late. You must go back to bed. Tomorrow’s your birthday.”

Lennie solemnly reiterated for John’s sake, “Tomorrow is my birthday. Are you going to come?” She laid it down as a regal duty.

“Ah. No. I regret that I cannot.”

She frowned and levelled at him her serious appraisal. “When, then?”

“Mr. Norfield is just visiting,” Emmett said. Lennie shot daggers at him. Really, she was carrying the Princess in the Tower thing too far. “Lennie, baby, Mr. Norfield has to go home now, and you must go to bed, it’s very late for a little girl.”

She ignored this and asked John, “Where do you live?”

“In a suitcase,” said John.

“Go to bed!” Emmett shouted.

Lennie shot him another killing glance and then, absurdly, indicated to John that he must again kneel. When he had obeyed, she said, “Is it true?”

John betrayed his own fatigue and bewilderment by looking up uncertainly at Emmett before responding limply, “Is what true?”

“About the Russians taking care of you.”

“I think you’d better listen to your father and go to bed.”

“Have you got it?” she persisted in a whisper. “Did you bring it?”

“Did I bring what?” John said, alarmed.

“The secret atom.”

John was getting to his feet. “Really, you should go to bed.”

Suzanne seemed frozen where she stood. “What did she say?”

Lennie pulled on John’s arm. “Give it to me.”

“Mr. Norfield is leaving,” Emmett said.

“I promise I’ll keep it safe. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“But I haven’t got it,” said John. He even searched his pockets anxiously as if in proof.

“If you don’t give it to me right now, it might get out.”

“It won’t.” John calmed himself, bent close to Lennie’s face and tenderly added, “It won’t get out.”

Lenore shook her head. She backed away, took the first few steps backward slowly. With one last dire, disappointed dismissal — “I don’t trust you” — she went up the stairs.

Emmett followed her into her bedroom and sat beside her on the bed while she arranged her limbs, as was her habit. He could hear their voices, John and Suzanne’s, downstairs. He patted Lennie in a vague attempt at comfort. “What was all that about?” he asked. She didn’t answer but laid herself neatly. It could be from television, he thought; she probably imagines all kinds of things, and the TV is all about the atom bomb right now, the Russians and the Bomb. She’d heard the word Russia on the news countless times, she’d heard it tonight, eavesdropping from the balcony. She was an imaginative child and shared her mother’s taste for melodrama. He asked, “Can you sleep?”

“No.”

“Well. Try.” He was impatient to get back downstairs. He kissed her, patted her leg under the light blanket, “Night-night,” and left her there, turning at the door to say, “I’ll be back up in a little while.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Sleep.”

When he returned to the living room, he found it empty. So was the kitchen, and the sunroom, the backyard. He went down to the basement, to Suzanne’s darkroom. The door was shut, he tapped softly and went in. Her red lamp was burning. She must have been here; she never left it on. The drawers where she stored her prints were closed. He knelt and opened the bottom drawer, looked inside, and then closed it again.

The basement was chilly. The sweater she always wore when she was working in here had fallen off the stool and lay on the concrete floor. Evidence of a life that did not need him. The Scotch was wearing thin, and reliable fond love had turned, like the worm, into grievance. He turned off her lamp, went back up to the living room, and switched off the lamps there too, then sat on the couch in a path of light from the street.

She came home long after midnight. She didn’t see Emmett waiting in the living room but went to the foot of the stairs and stood with her hand on the banister, looking up. Her arms were bare. He shifted in his chair to let her know that he was there. She startled, “Oh! Emmett, it’s you.”

“Where have you been?”

When she came closer, he could smell cigarette smoke on her clothing. “He’s dying,” she said. “That’s why he came back.”

“Eleventh-hour conversion?”

“I think he still feels the same. I mean, about Russia.”

“He doesn’t look well.”

“He just came to —” She waved toward the chair that John had occupied, as if he were still there, faintly receding. With greater resolve, defiantly, she continued, “He came for his notebook.”

“What’s that?”

“The black book he always had about him — you know how he used to write in it all the time.”

“Yes.”

“Well, anyway, he wanted it.” She was wearing a gold necklace he didn’t think he’d seen before, twisting it around her finger.

He thought of her darkroom, the empty bottom drawer. “And you’d kept his notebook for him, all these years?”

She nodded yes. “And he wanted to see Lenore.”

“Why?”

She began to run her hand up and down, up and down her bare arm.

“Why would he want to see Lenore?”

She didn’t look ugly — she never could — but her face was abandoned, especially the eyes, which regarded him with all the neutrality of water. She made the slightest movement, barely a shrug.

He reached to touch her hand to make her stop stroking herself.

“Is she sleeping?” she asked.

“I hope so.”

Then her face seemed to come to life for him again. She called to him softly, “Emmett. Let’s go to bed.”

They passed Lenore’s bedroom on their way to their own and saw her lying wide-eyed. Suzanne gave a low moan and would go in. “Come,” he whispered to her.

He closed their door behind them. Suzanne was stiff, distant, and then he began to feel her stir and respond. He was almost dreaming, he shut his eyes while he caressed her. He’d pulled her under him, when the door opened. Suzanne slipped out from beneath him, sitting up and with a shaky voice was asking Lennie, “Are you all right?”

Lennie stood at their bed. Suzanne took one of her pillows and put it down, and Lennie laid herself crossways at their feet. Then the customary arrangement of her limbs. Suzanne asked her if she needed the mohair throw and she shook her head — Emmett could hear her hair scratch at the pillow, No.

The sheets were white and fresh. He curled on his side and tucked his hands between his knees. When he woke up in the night, aware that he needed to be careful not to disturb Lennie at the end of the bed, he could hear her, could hear her wakefulness. “I don’t trust you,” she had said. Maybe she was too intelligent, over capacity. Too wary. How easily she had adopted John’s cool accent. Today she was seven years old. How many hours had Lennie been awake? He did the math.

 

Chapter Two

The little man standing on the front stoop peered from under a hat that was too big for him, as was his grey flannel suit. He had papery white skin and teary pink eyes that blinked furiously in the midday sun. He looked like a white rabbit.

Lennie’s birthday had dawned warm and quickly grew hot. She followed her father to the door, and when she saw the little fellow in the oversized grey suit standing there, she climbed up into Emmett’s arms, her feet dangling almost to his knees. “Yes?” he asked.

“You are Mr. Jones.”

He agreed, he was Mr. Jones. He thought he was speaking to a Fuller Brush salesman. Lennie laid her head on his chest and wound her legs around him. She was expecting that the arrival of the rabbit had something to do with her birthday.

“Would you come with me?” Rabbit demanded.

Emmett heard Suzanne clatter with the pans in the kitchen, preparing lunch, and he turned uncertainly toward the interior of his house, Lennie twisting so she could keep an eye on Rabbit. Emmett returned his attention to the little man and asked, “Who are you?”

Rabbit looked from under the brim of his hat, blinking painfully in the sun. Despite the absurdity of his appearance, he assumed absolute authority. “Lieutenant Morton sends for you.” He stepped back to let Emmett pass.

With some difficulty Emmett unwound Lennie and set her down. He made a move to indicate that he would go back inside to say goodbye to his wife, but Rabbit, by dint of a small impatient gesture, let him know that there no time, he was to come forthwith.

He left Lennie standing at the open front door. “Tell your mother I’ll be right back,” he said. A black Buick was parked on the street. Rabbit ushered him into its backseat and shut the door, jumped in behind the wheel, and the car started to roll.

 

A Mountie in khakis stood at the gate marking the entrance to wooded grounds surrounded by a stone wall covered in ivy. The Mountie casually saluted when the car pulled up before the gate and moved aside so the groundskeeper, rake in hand, could let them through. The car was now on a private road surrounded by birch stands mixed with dogwood. The floor of the forest was cleared and raked. Emmett felt naked without his wallet, his jacket and hat.

They pulled up before a stone house with small windows. He tried to get out of the car, but there was no handle. Rabbit leapt out and around and opened the door for him, his eyes leaking, his white face with its pink eyes shrivelled against the hated sun. He piloted Emmett into the house through a massive oak door.

Inside stood Robert Morton, stockier, rather better-looking than he was even a few years ago, in a dark suit with narrow lapels and unusually narrow trousers. He greeted Emmett politely, “Glad you could make it. I’d like you come this way, if you please.”

The rabbit stepped up so close to Emmett’s back he could feel the gun in its holster inside the absurd grey suit.

Morton interrupted sharply, “That’ll be fine, Grey. Wait in the car.”

Grey, Rabbit, chewed something between his front teeth and looked as malevolent as his size would permit. Emmett was glad to walk away from his hot little body.

They went through a large old kitchen and outside to the backyard. Morton took a path set in flagstone. On either side the grass was wet, recently watered. The place reminded him of the house his father had kept for Sachiko, and then he was reminded of Aoi, and of his son, James, in Japan. The memory heartened him because it was his alone.

At the back of the yard, fifty feet away from the main house, was a small cottage in the Tudor fashion, white plaster with timber braces. “Go ahead,” Morton said and watched while Emmett stooped under the low doorway before coming in after him and shutting them inside.

They were in a pleasant space furnished in an old-fashioned Victorian way. Two men seated before an empty fireplace stood when Morton entered. They were dressed in plainclothes with black leather jackets. One of them said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Jones.” Emmett wondered where Morton’s stupid sidekick Partridge had gone to.

Morton indicated where Emmett was to sit, and when they were all four settled, he said, “First of all, I have a present for you.” A leather legal briefcase sat beside Morton’s chair. He bent down, opened it, and removed three accordion file folders. “Here you go.” Without fully standing up, he took a step forward and placed the folders in Emmett’s hands. The plainclothes officers looked on with bland goodwill.

Emmett propped the files upright and read the labels on each one.

Robert Morton said, “The Jones Files. One, Two, and Three. 1949–1959. Of course, we don’t have the FBI’s stuff on you.”

Jones 1949–1959. Emmett had been under surveillance for the last ten years, under surveillance long after he’d been “cleared” in the investigation of 1953. He suspected this, yes, but their spying on him was so professionally accomplished that he hadn’t seen it, had warned himself against becoming paranoid. He thought he’d been cured of any naive belief that his country would not purposefully set itself against him, when the RCMP had given their files on him to the US. But a residue of faith had remained despite his wariness; he’d fallen yet again for the myth of goodness. What a fool. He was unable to conceal his shock. He looked up into Morton’s smug face.

He placed the files on the floor at his feet and then picked up one with shaking hands. It was in chronological order. His editorials published in the university newspaper, The Varsity. Copies of reports he’d filed in Ottawa in 1950. Memos he’d sent to Bill Masters as a policy analyst in Tokyo. A letter from George Miller of the Washington think tank, memos to Harold Gembey of the Security Panel. Transcripts of the interviews when he was formally under investigation.

“It’s not everybody gets to see their file,” Morton mildly observed.

And there were photographs. Emmett with Leonard Fischer and John Norfield walking down Avenue Road at night, Leonard’s arm around Emmett’s shoulder. One of Aoi wearing her Manchurian cloak. She is kneeling in the snow and Emmett is walking away from her, toward the camera. He hadn’t seen anyone taking these pictures.

Suzanne crossing College Street. She’s young. Carrying what looks like a school satchel. How young they were. There’s an attitude of self-satisfaction in Suzanne that is no longer there.

“It adds up,” Morton observed. “I mean, in sheer bulk.”

The two plainclothes smirked, but Emmett had the impression that they rarely expected to understand Morton and didn’t care whether they did or didn’t.

On a table beside Morton lay a black notebook. He opened it, leafing through pages of handwritten script. In a low voice, as if to himself, “Out-of-date phone listings and a bunch of poems.” He tossed it to Emmett.

“Facts,” Morton continued, “are simple enough, I suppose. So-and-so left the house at such-and-such an hour in the company of so-and-so’s wife. That kind of thing. Simple. What’s hard, what takes skill, is in the assembly. Shifting, rearranging. Try it one way, move the pieces, try it another way. Making a picture. Right?”

Emmett began to look through each file more carefully. His instinct was to feel shy at being observed while looking at himself. They weren’t loving photographs, not family photos, these. The mechanism of the telephoto lens. How furtive they seem, he and his beloveds. And how deluded. He tried to handle the material as if he had a right to it and wasn’t revealing a weakness for the regard of others.

Morton added, “That’s most of what we’ve got.”

There’s more. Emmett started to review Jones File One. Here is Leonard Fischer. The private density of Leonard’s body, the intense impact of the evil he’d endured. One and half million children murdered, Leonard’s sisters among them, only fourteen years ago, so many millions killed. He recalled Leonard’s phlegmy laugh. Ich schlief, ich schlief — From a deep dream have I awoken.

He riffled through Jones File Two. He needed to see whether they’d ever photographed Suzanne with Norfield.

Morton spun his chair and straddled it backward, tipping it eagerly toward him. “You enjoyed a reunion with an old friend last night.”

Emmett deposited Jones File Two on the floor and picked up Jones File Three, sorting through it while he answered Morton, “Yes, John Norfield was at my home last night.”

And suddenly it was in his hand: his son, a photograph of a little boy, the shock of love and recognition, his son, he’s looking almost directly into the lens, his wondering face clear, innocent, beautiful, and the skirt of a woman behind him, likely Aoi.

Emmett was aware of a tightening apprehension in Morton’s attitude as Morton observed the effect of this remarkable disclosure, this revelation. Aoi had never sent any pictures; Emmett had never before seen his son, yet he knew with every fibre that it was he.

Emmett clumsily shuffled the photos, finally sliding the photograph of the boy back into the deck. He forced himself to speak as if continuing the conversation. “Norfield came by our house. Unexpectedly.” He looked up and met Morton’s gleeful eyes but made himself continue, “He visited for a little while. Then he left.”

“Accompanied by your wife.”

Emmett slid the photographs into the briefcase. He had to keep talking, his voice was constricting. He had seen his son. He would not let Morton know his feelings. He said, “I’ve told you many times. Norfield was a friend in university.”

“Now, that’s not entirely accurate, is it.”

“My wife was a student then. Naive. We were all naive. You’re spying on school friends. You must get tired of it.”

“Not at all.”

Indeed, Morton didn’t look weary; he was tanned, fit, enviably clear. He watched Emmett, waiting for him to explode. “If we’re all finished here,” Emmett said, “I’d like to go home.”

“There’s one more thing. Before we release you to the wild.” Morton stood, carefully replacing the chair at the kitchen table. “Our mutual interest — that is, the elusive Mr. Norfield — is at an end.”

Emmett had to ask what “at an end” meant.

“He’s come in.”

“He’s very ill.”

“That’s probably why.”

“He has decided to return?”

“So he says.”

If that were true, John would spend the rest of his life being followed, interrogated by Morton and his “intelligence.” Surely he was intending to slip out of the country again somehow.

“At any rate,” Morton continued with mild impatience, signalling Emmett’s dismissal, “he’s done you a favour.”

“Has he.”

“We made a deal. A bargain. We leave you and your wife alone, and he gives us his full cooperation.”

The plainclothes stood. Morton picked up the briefcase and was handing it to Emmett when he stopped, put his hand inside, and removed a white cardboard box. Emmett recognized it as a box for audiotape. Morton laid the white box on the table and then offered again to put the briefcase into Emmett’s hands. “We’ve kept you long enough. ”

Emmett didn’t move. “I don’t need another man to bargain for me. I’ve got nothing to hide. You’ve proven that.”

“Grey will drive you home.”

“Yes. But not because you made a deal with Norfield.”

“I’m sorry to have disturbed your lunch.”

“I’m going to talk to John.”

“That would be stupid. And irresponsible. You’re a family man.”

This was apparently funny; the plainclothes grinned.

“Take the path around,” Morton told him, “you don’t need to go through the house again.” He went to the door and opened it. “You’ll find the car waiting for you out front.” He looked at his watch to indicate that he had more important things to do.

Emmett took the briefcase. He passed Morton so close he saw the spindles of amber in his eyes, as if the sun had got into him and made him invincible. He said, “I’m not part of your ridiculous bargain, Morton. I’ve got nothing to do with you. I’m not even part of your fantasy.”

“Ah.” Morton smiled sadly. “And here I’ve been feeling so close.”

 

Chapter Three

Blue Sea Lake

The ryegrass on the lawn by the lake prickled Lennie’s legs and shoulders and neck, but she focused hard on infinity, which rose farther than the feathery clouds and travelled deeply past the sky.

Summer was a time to recover from Grade One, to let the giants of Classroom 1-B shrivel and wane. She and her mother “got away” the minute school ended, at twelve noon June 28, the car packed to the roof, somewhere in all that stuff a new bathing suit for Lenore.

Grade One was behind her. And good riddance. She hadn’t been the most popular girl in 1-B, not by a long shot. Peter Robinson in the desk behind her had called her “a hairy fink” when she wasn’t there to hear him. That nice boy Adam had informed her of this. And face it (a phrase Lennie liked, “face it,” or “let’s face it”), her two best friends, Sarah Martin and Jenny Walker, weren’t her best friends anymore.

Sarah and Jenny would be going to a different school in another neighbourhood for Grade Two, for something called “Acceleration.” The teachers said they were “above average” and chose those two morons to take a bus to another school. Anyway, Grade Two was in September. Far away, far as Mars.

Sarah and Jennie might have been smarter, but Lennie was more intelligent. Her Grade One teacher, Mrs. Duncan, called Lennie “a dreamer.” Lennie had felt the holy ghost swell through her blood when she heard this; she’d thought it was a compliment. But Mrs. Duncan has betrayed her. Things happen in patterns. Lennie understands that she will be betrayed often in her whole entire life.

An airplane cut the sky, a hurting, carving sound. Up there, her father told her, it’s always today; he said that if you go up out of the sky, past the blue ocean of air, if you travel up and out of here fast enough, time no longer happens. What we have is gravity pinning us down, forcing us into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries.

This is a great loop of thinking that Lennie tried once to explain to Sarah and Jenny. Sarah and Jenny fell backward together onto the couch in Jenny’s den, which is a room of windows above the garage, the two of them rolling their eyes and saying, “Really, Reilly, you’re a riot,” whatever that means. It was their new saying. They put on an English accent when they said this.

Lennie remembered how sick of herself she was that day, just standing there like a clown in her red stretch pants that bagged at the knees. She tried to tell them that if you go way up into outer space fast enough you don’t get any older, you’re always just how old you are now. Seven. Forever. She drew her hands over her head to illustrate what she called “the great domain of life.” Sarah and Jenny said, “Really, Reilly, you’re a riot,” and broke open a box of Ritz crackers, intending to eat the whole thing. Gravity and time pressed on Lennie so hard she went home. She hadn’t seen either of them since, and wouldn’t see them all summer because they went to Anglican Summer Camp. Lenore would never go to Anglican Summer Camp. She’d die there.

The lake shushed at the shore. Seagulls floated on the hot wind above where she sprawled on the grass and sent herself into space. Faster than light, Dad said, means faster than time.

When it rains after an atom bomb, the rain burns holes in people’s faces. They start to throw up. When they look in the mirror, they’re melting, their skin falls off in globs of pus. They run outside and die in the middle of the street with everybody watching from their picture windows.

The secret atom got out. The man in her mother’s photographs took it to Russia. Lennie had wanted him to like her and think she’s pretty. She’s ashamed of this. She might grow up to be a murderer or a thief. The great domain of life hurts inside her chest. The man in her mother’s photographs came to her house and liked her. The photographs are her.

Except for Kim and except for Dad and President Kennedy, men smell bad. They make cigarette burns on the tables in the living room. One man stepped on her toe at a cocktail party and didn’t even notice. Cocktail parties are revolting. Jenny’s parents have them and they boil lobsters alive.

But the hardest of all is knowing Dad is a spy. A spy and a communist. Adam told her way back in Grade One, he told her nicely. There are hardly any nice boys, but he’s one. He told her when they were at the sandy end of the schoolyard where the stinkweeds get tall and nobody else could hear, and he told her like it was something he felt she should know and he felt sorry to have to be the messenger. He has a nice voice, Adam. Lenore saw he felt sorry for her. Shame is hot as pee.

Lennie knows her father loves her. He still picks her up like she’s a baby and talks to her at night when she can’t sleep. He’s handsome. He’s very intelligent. He has a boy called James who lives in Japan. And he is a communist spy. Often the work of forgiving him makes her eyes sting with tears.

Lenore’s friends’ dads give them nicknames: “Muffin,” “Doll-face.” When they were in Grade One, Sarah’s father spanked her and Jenny and Sarah for running through the living room after Sarah’s mother had waxed the floor, so Lenore never went back there; they always had to play at Jenny or Lennie’s houses. He made her bend over and then he whacked her bum. The shame is on him. Jenny’s dad tells knock-knock jokes and sits on the floor beside the hi-fi he got her; he also bought Jenny a Harry Belafonte record. These fathers aren’t communist spies. But they’re simpletons.

Sometimes she envies simpletons, but she wouldn’t want one for a father. Simpletons send their moron children to Anglican Summer Camp. She raises her legs and waves her feet in the air.

 

Suzanne threw their bags into their rooms, collected the saucers of mouse seed from the corners of the veranda, put the food away, and went to her darkroom — what used to be a pantry between the kitchen and Lenore’s bedroom at the back of the cottage. She closed the door behind her, and without turning on the light she breathed in the sour stench.

She would have a show opening in the fall, her work along with the work of several other “women photographers.” A journalist from the newspaper was coming to the cottage soon, this afternoon, to interview her “in her native habitat.” She and Lenore had to take the boat back to the landing for three o’clock to collect the journalist. Too soon. She’d barely arrived.

She’d been interviewed before. But she was anxious about it. The rush to get away from Ottawa as soon as Lenore was released from school, all the packing and watering the garden and the blinds drawn and Emmett tied up till tonight; she couldn’t stop this automatic rush forward, and her nerves were crisp, prickling across her face.

Suzanne stood in the pitch-dark. She’d let go of the door handle, and in the small, familiar space she had the sensation that she didn’t know where she was, that she could be hanging upside down or one step away from a deep pit. Outside in the bright world, white poplar and aspen clapped in the sun, the gulls cried over the lake. She was still — what — shiny, glinting from her encounter with John. How like him to show up that way, mysterious, bitterly unromantic and very, very romantic too. He was bad for her. She had escaped him. But seeing him again had made her feel seared, singed inside, nervy yet beautiful.

Now John was gone, gone for good, to live in Russia where the streets are wide and the winters cold. He’d told her, Leningrad looks like Ottawa. Imagine. Broad streets that look like Wellington Avenue, John said, but the buildings there are pink and yellow, drab from war. He might be back in Russia by now. She will never see him again. Eventually, slowly, this pain will subside, she’ll no longer feel this way, like the strings on an instrument, stretched, pitched, played by him, awful, grotesque, almost unmanageable; she’d scolded herself, driving here, she was afraid she’d get in an accident so distracted was she, listening to his silence as if for a code. But she has Lenore now. There is Lenore. There is Emmett. She’ll recover again, and there will be Emmett.

She felt a surge of hope. She had a good life. She loved her family. Here in this space, she intended to do good work all summer. She shuffled a step backward, then again and again before she felt the cool pine door at her back, the door handle jabbing her, she opened the door to the heat, to colour, and went to find Lennie.

There were the pale blue shorts, the matching jersey, stretched out on the lawn. Lennie’s bare arms rose and twined like thin white snakes. Suzanne couldn’t hear her, but she guessed that Lennie was talking to herself.

Lenore’s loneliness in this past school year, the patient way she took it, filled Suzanne with fearful admiration. It reminded her of when Lennie first learned to swim, the moment of letting go, seeing her buttery baby pedalling through the water, no strings attached. Now, Lennie’s narrow chest like a birdcage, her aloof sideways approach, her reserve, and Suzanne yearning to gather the kindling of elbows and knees. She let the screen door bang shut and walked across the lawn. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Lennie gave one of her lucid glances and resumed her study of the sky, sunlight through her fingers as they formed a cat’s cradle, or a pentaprism; maybe Lenore, the grey-eyed observer, will become a photographer.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Nothin’.”

Suzanne sat beside her and began to finger through the grass, searching for a four-leaf clover. Green is complicated by blue and yellow and red. Colour was making Suzanne anxious. She didn’t know if her unease with colour photography was the result of good taste or a complete lack of talent. Her colour photographs often failed — they were pictures of things, unless she manipulated the filters till the subject morphed in a hallucinatory way. That flinty little critic Walmsley was probably right: her voodoo on film is pretentious.

Part of the show in August would be another series of staged images with lamps and gobos and filters on her lenses. She’d hired an actor and photographed him in a trench coat, against paintings, a diorama of an alley or a highway, climbing a rise to a crossroads with a watercolour sky ahead of him, away from her, his face hidden. It was important to her that he be an actor.

Of course these are photographs of John. Emmett has figured that out, she knows, and she feels rather awed at the largesse of Emmett’s love.

In a subseries for the show, the actor’s face is revealed, heavily made up with a thick layer of white powder and the high, startled eyebrows of the geisha. In other portraits the actor wears more conventionally glamorous makeup, slanting eyeliner and false eyelashes and so on, his lips painted a red that looks black in the photograph. Who are these people, who are they meant to be? No one. A proliferation of empty wishes.

She’d like to develop more natural portraits of Lennie, but Lennie said she’d take her soul. Lennie permitted Emmett to take her picture; she’d even sit still for him. But if Suzanne went anywhere near her daughter with a camera in her hand, Lennie vanished like a little animal down a hole. Suzanne didn’t want the blundering power that she held over her daughter; her maternal force was like an overdeveloped muscle, like a Charley horse.

She knew she’d spoiled Lennie’s fantasizing. Even the westward clouds lose fluidity, do they? When a mother comes around? “Want some lunch before we go to the landing?”

Lenore gave her a look that said, Must you bother me with lowly matters?

“Cucumber sand-wishes.” Her little girl’s word for sandwich and, judging by the disdainful response, out of date. Suzanne ran a hand down Lennie’s shin to her ankle. “How about a swim first. It’s hot.”

“A swim?”

“See if your new bathing suit works.”

A temptation. Lennie rewarded her mother with a smile for an okay try at a joke. She took a last look at outer space. Angel-time being over, she had to get back to the land of the living. She got up, dizzy, and said, “I like it when I can see the whole planet.”

Suzanne didn’t know what Lennie meant, but her heart leapt. Lennie let her kiss the sunny top of her head.

 

Chapter Four

Now that Emmett knew that the surveillance had been ongoing for ten years, he could never trust his privacy again. And knowing now that his son James was under surveillance, he needed to get to Japan, as if seeing the boy was the same as protecting him, a sort of magic thinking.

From his window, across his darkened lawn when he went down to turn off the lights at night, he’d think he’d seen someone, a shadow crossing the driveway, dodging behind the garage, a small figure, impossible even to tell if it was a man or a woman. Perhaps a mirage. If he went outside, of course the shadow disappeared, absorbed into the leafy back lane.

Norfield’s reappearance had been unsettling, reawakening a friendship, or love. Emmett hadn’t told Suzanne about the deal John had made with the RCMP, the exchange of his freedom for theirs. She’s upset. Better that she thinks that Norfield is in Russia. She’s high-strung. She can’t handle it, thinking John has harmed himself for their sake, thinking he’s accessible, that he might show up again, surprise them. It was time — not to let go of their past but to let it change meaning; let the past become foreign.

Emmett was thirty-nine years old. The world he’d gone to war for, and the post-war world he’d once been convinced he understood better than most men, was both banal and insane. The Russians had recently tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles, preparing for long-range nuclear rocket strikes, playing a game of catch-up with the Americans in a race to blow up the planet.

A Conservative, John Diefenbaker, was now prime minister, elected with a strong majority last winter, and Diefenbaker’s band of earnest oddballs was running things in Ottawa. Diefenbaker was incoherent on the arms race. Emmett wondered if he was crazy. He’d met crazy leaders before — General MacArthur came to mind — though Diefenbaker was Canadian-crazy, un-heroic crazy, tormented by fear and envy of President Kennedy.

Emmett tried to talk to Bill Masters about Prime Minister Diefenbaker. “These Bomarc missiles,” he said to Bill over lunch. “You know that Dief is prepared to arm them with nuclear warheads?”

Bill was eating a hamburger. He nodded, sure he knew that.

“Paid for by the Americans,” Emmett continued, “who are instructing us to store them here, where we’ll be targets for a first strike by the Russians.”

Bill took a slug of Orange Crush. It was noon, he wasn’t having a drink, doctor’s orders. “We need defence,” said Bill. “We’re gonna need a hell of a lot more than the Bomarc missiles if there’s a nuclear war.”

There were more than Bomarc missiles. Diefenbaker was making verbal commitments to store American nuclear missiles in Labrador and Newfoundland. The US pressed Diefenbaker to agree to store atomic bombs along with anti-submarine nuclear warheads. Canada would be the battlefield of a nuclear World War Three, a quick bright battlefield in a war that everyone on earth would lose in a matter of minutes. The world would burn to ash, nothing would survive, neither root nor branch, this was a fact of every Canadian’s strangely dull existence in 1959.

 

Chapter Five

At 4:25 on a summery Friday afternoon, Emmett’s secretary asked to be let go early; her husband was picking her up so they could go to Kingston for the long weekend. Emmett told her to go, and she sweetly wished him a good holiday next week, telling him she’d “hold the fort.” He could hear the voices of people well-wishing as they fled the building, a peaceful, glad evacuation, and he stood at the window watching them rush out into summer.

With everyone gone, the offices were provocatively quiet, waxy and gleaming, and he felt excited to find himself quite alone in the citadel. He didn’t have to hurry; Suzanne had said she’d keep Lennie up late for the boat ride to the landing to pick him up. He took a key from his trouser pocket and unlocked his desk drawer where he kept his lovely little Minox in its leather wallet, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He stroked its cool surface and slipped it into his pocket.

He was agitated and decided to go for a fast walk downstairs and run back up again before finishing the paperwork on his desk. He was on his way down when he encountered Prime Minister Diefenbaker on his way up.

“Good day.”

“Oh. Hello, sir.”

The stairwell was empty. The prime minister pivoted, one foot on the upper stair, and said, “Say.”

“Sir?”

“I read your memo.”

“Thank you —”

Diefenbaker raised his hand to indicate, No need. It was almost unbelievable that this particular prime minister would read a memo by staff. Diefenbaker distrusted the civil service. But he said, “This Vietnamese character — President Diem — ”

“Yes, sir.”

“The Vietnamese aren’t happy with him.”

“Nobody is, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“So you say, so you say —”

He had read it. Emmett waited.

Finally, Diefenbaker said, “The Americans are backing the wrong horse!” He chuckled.

“That might well be the case in this instance, sir.”

Then Diefenbaker added in a confiding, conspiratorial tone, “I’m thinking of inviting Khrushchev for a visit.”

Emmett held his pose, thinking that he must surely be joking.

But Diefenbaker continued, “It’ll show that son of a bitch Kennedy, we’re not some crushed satellite he can kick around.”

Emmett blinked, trying to reconcile this with Diefenbaker’s recent eagerness to store the Americans’ nuclear warheads at Goose Bay.

“You like the idea, young fellow?” Emmett was casting about for an answer when Diefenbaker suddenly asked, “How is your wife?”

“My wife? She’s well. Thank you.”

Diefenbaker turned his back and began to climb the stairs. “Give her our kind regards, will you?”

Our kind regards. His and his wife Olive’s kind regards. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell Diefenbaker even knew Suzanne’s name. Pearson did. The McCallum tribe was Liberal. Emmett slowly descended the stairs. He felt lightheaded; he lived in a place without any atmosphere. A man has to fight hard to find purchase in this country. He was floating aimlessly through space, turning and turning in the zero gravity of his quiescent land.

 

Lennie and Suzanne were sitting in the boat at the landing when he drove up and parked. He kissed his wife, apologizing for being late, but he could see that she was so distracted as to not really be here. He kissed Lenore, who was sitting on the engine cover wearing her pyjamas and a white canvas life jacket. A still night. Mars shivering in the black water.

She piloted them to the cottage, a faint mist rising as the lake cooled, the throaty rumble of the engine giving them an excuse not to talk. They docked and tied up, and Suzanne carried his duffle bag so he could carry Lennie, and still they didn’t speak.

Suzanne made hot chocolate. Emmett put a bit of rum in hers and a lot of rum in his. They took it to the veranda, Lennie amazed at being out of bed at this hour, breaking the silence. “I’m going to be ten someday,” she announced defensively, “and thirteen. When I’m a grown-up, I can do whatever I want.”

“You’ve never been as old as you are this second,” he said.

Lennie’s grey eyes widened. “It’s because of all the light hitting us.” She looked out the black window. “How can I get older when it’s night out?” Suzanne gave a giddy laugh. Lennie went on, answering herself. “Because I’ve got light inside.”

Now that it was possible to speak, he told Suzanne that he’d had a conversation with the prime minister a few hours ago, adding that Diefenbaker had sent his and Olive’s kind regards. She said, “That’s nice,” and she nestled into her wicker settee.

He drank his rummy chocolate. Suzanne had assumed the prime minister would know her. He said, “It wasn’t entirely nice.”

“Why?”

He tried to resist the urge to hurt her feelings. He was tired, tired of being Sisyphus, pushing the stone uphill, performing incremental work. She was at home, she’d never known anything but home. He’d let her have everything she wanted, and tonight he felt tired and resentful and frightened and sick of it. Frightened of the possibility of nuclear war, very frightened that he couldn’t protect them, frightened that whatever he had done to redeem the value of his life, to make his existence extraordinary, it wouldn’t matter, his courage and ambitions were an inconvenience to her, she needed him to do nothing more than be the banal facilitator of her pleasant life, the one she got instead of John Norfield. He was a servant. He realized that he was scalding mad.

“What did the prime minister actually say ?” Suzanne asked.

“He read my memo.”

“No,” she said, “I mean about us?”

Lennie got out of her chair and stood on one leg, her cup of hot chocolate in her two hands. She was beginning to bristle, starting up her almost invisible fibrillation.

“I could do — I could,” he waved his cup, then drained it, “do some good work.”

“You could do some good work how?” Abruptly alert, she added, “Where?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about Asia? Not that it’s my specialty.”

“No married men. That’s the policy. You’re going to have to divorce me.”

Lennie put both feet on the floor.

He said, “No.” Then to Lennie, “I won’t.”

Lennie was visibly trembling now. Suzanne told her to go brush her teeth and she’d come to tuck her in. “Go,” she repeated. When she was gone, Suzanne said, “You want to see Aoi. You want to see your other family. You fret about your son. Don’t think I don’t know how you feel.”

“Let’s drop it for tonight,” he said.

She repeated her question, what exactly did the prime minister say?

“He thought you might want to help me host a state visit from Khrushchev.”

“Me?”

“Why not? Cook him a fancy dinner. Show his wife around Parliament Hill.”

Suzanne threw her head back, exposing her throat. “Oh my god, that’s so crazy.”

She’d started to laugh, but she’d also started to cry. It surprised him, his anger toppled and subsided. He went to sit beside her and put his thumb to the corner of her eye to feel her tears.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Diefenbaker wants to invite Khrushchev and we’d have to entertain?” She was sobbing with laughter.

He laughed too, his tired eyes stinging, and he said, “We’re the perfect couple.” He stroked her hair.

“Everybody would be so happy to believe we’re communists,” she said, weeping and laughing. “They’d finally understand us.”

“Do you want everyone to understand us?” he asked. “What do you want?”

She jumped a little, a guilty, involuntary, wall-eyed shying from him. “Nothing. I want” — she waved at the room — “this. You.”

“I could be useful,” he said quietly. “I can see things clearly.” She looked startled, he thought, as if threatened. In the memo that Diefenbaker had actually read, he’d written that President Diem was a disaster and couldn’t hold out much longer. He’d written that the Vietcong were a national movement in Vietnam and that they’d win from inside the South. Now he said to Suzanne almost lazily, feeling the rum sweeten his fatigue, “The South Vietnamese support the Vietcong communists. There’s going to be a coup in Vietnam.”

He watched her face fall. “A coup,” she repeated. “Did you tell the prime minister there’s going to be a coup?”

“Everybody knows it.”

“Emmett,” Suzanne said slowly, “will he think that you got this information from some kind of inside source?”

“A spy?” He whispered, “I got it from The Globe and Mail.”

“You did not.”

“I read between the lines.”

“Tell me. How do you know what’s going on with the communists in Vietnam?”

“It’s my job, it’s what I do.”

“Who do you talk to?”

“I have lunch every day with a mysterious representative of the International Ladies Garment Workers.”

“I’m serious.”

“So is she.” He put his hand where her shirt opened at the collar, pulled at the strap of her bra, and felt a rush of desire. “Hanoi is taking over the insurgency from the southern communists. It’s war. China’s involved, Russia’s involved. The Americans will be bombing the place one day soon.”

Warily she asked, “Where’d you hear that?”

“In an American tabloid.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I subscribe.”

“At the Department?”

“I told the prime minister that any attempt at military victory over the communists in Vietnam is going to fail.”

“You told the prime minister that the communists are going to take Vietnam.”

“They will.”

“He’ll fire you.”

He liked that she understood that much; it was strangely true in Canada, in mimicry of the situation in the US, that any man reckless enough to contemplate the possibility of a victory for communism anywhere on earth was considered disloyal. But Diefenbaker couldn’t fire a civil servant. He tugged at her bra strap. “He can’t,” he told her. “I’m non-partisan.”

She laughed again more calmly and began to fool with his hair, one of her habits, trying to make it curl around her finger. “Tell me really. How do you know all this stuff?”

He said, “I’m not all by myself in my great wisdom.”

“Emmett, baby,” she breathed, “are you happy?”

He took her cup to put it on the floor, she leaned forward to run her hand down his spine and then up around his neck. He was thinking that he’d have one more drink and then he would make love to his wife, he’d make love, he’d make sex, he murmured into her hair, “I’d like to take you to bed,” and looked toward the lamplight reflected in the window where he saw Lenore, so it was at first unclear to him whether she was inside or outside looking in.

Lenore, pale, puppet-straight, shot him her dire stare.

He heard Suzanne’s lips pluck apart. Lennie’s attention dropped to the floor for a second, then back to his face. It was enough, this fracture, this momentary show of self-consciousness, to release in him a hot surge of contempt. He bellowed, “Don’t sneak around!”

Lennie was out of the room before he finished the sentence, Suzanne rushing after her, hissing, “Asshole!”

Alone he went to the kitchen and poured rum into Suzanne’s cup, drinking where her lipstick remained. There was nowhere to go in his wife’s cottage. He was too drunk to go swimming. Out on the water, he heard the chittering love talk of a pair of otters, a party, he and Suzanne had once said, watching them twine each other in moonlight one summer long past. An innocent desire that eluded him, lowly consort to the Ice Queen.

He drained the cup, poured more rum, returned to the veranda, and poked under a rain-stained wicker table with drawers filled with poker chips, playing cards and matches, a cribbage board, stray Scrabble pieces. Beneath the table was a pile of dusty magazines where he found a copy of Chatelaine 1953. A time of bliss, till solstice, that June when he’d learned that he would be investigated by the RCMP. But he had survived.

He lived alone among men and alone among his loved ones. He had known this was his fate even as a boy, in the parody his father had made of his family, his father opening the stage to self-consciousness by introducing his other love, Sachiko. In the war, he’d fallen for the delusion of belonging to Bomber Command. That had been an ecstatic well-blooded belonging, cynically devised by the generals. He’d awoken from that delusion to the pain of knowing that he’d been manipulated. Yet he fell in love again, with John Norfield, with Leonard Fischer, with their rejection of ordinary ambition, their communism, a totally paradoxical belonging that would always counter its own definitions. Ich schlief, ich schlief — From a deep dream have I awoken.

Norfield and Leonard’s communism required homelessness and the courage to live in that condition. Tonight, aloneness was painful because he was tired and he’d had too much to drink. Aloneness was his source of strength, his pride. Tonight it led to a sense of despair; tomorrow it might yield its private radiance. He could see things clearly only when he made himself awaken from the perpetual lure of belonging. Of longing to belong.

He’d fallen in love with Suzanne knowing that she loved him in return only as a rational, hopeful, compensatory method of surviving the passion she felt for John. Emmett thought, Yes, I’m a fool. Being alive is foolish. I awaken from one dream only to fall into another. The constant in his series of errors and delusions was his abiding love for Suzanne and Lenore.

He was looking at an article that he wouldn’t remember tomorrow. It was called, “The Pill That Could Change the World.” Then Lennie arrived smelling of lake water and slipped under his arm to lay her head on his chest and in her boy’s voice to ask him, “What are you reading?” She didn’t expect or wish him to answer, she didn’t give a damn what he was reading, she was giving him attention. He experienced the melting joy of a rehabilitated criminal.

Lennie sprawled with elaborate kindness across his lap. She had a quick gag reflex, and her father smelled of man. It was her duty to touch him with her wings.

He tossed aside Chatelaine to stroke his daughter’s cool bare arm.

 

Chapter Six

Emmett awoke the next day to a perfectly windless Saturday morning and discovered Suzanne gone from their rumpled bed. A white-throated sparrow sang its six notes. He had a hangover. Again. It wasn’t such a severe hangover that it wouldn’t be expelled by a swim. Outside in bright sunlight, his body was white in his swimming trunks, his bare feet on the cool stone stairs looked fungal, the skin puffy and premature.

Lenore and Suzanne were sitting on the dock wearing big and small versions of the same hat, straw with silk roses, their skin golden, their eyes as clear as the lake reflecting granite and pine boughs that rippled with the morning sun. He passed them and dived.

He was a foreigner here, a city creature, but his girls were lulled, he could see, creatures of Lethe mesmerized by pleasure, by peaceful boredom, rolling aside to let father-fish flop onto their towel stiff from drying in the sun. Suzanne put her finger into the beads of water on his freckling shoulder and murmured, “You’ll burn.”

She was relaxed, she wasn’t thinking about John, she was his again. He couldn’t sit or settle so he prepared a big breakfast that she and Lennie consumed as if this were simply a phase of their own photosynthesis.

Lennie still avoided eggs but put away a bushel of berries and a half loaf of bread. Chewing, she reached to put her palm to his chin and rubbed at the shadow there. “You’re priggly.” Her nose was plugged; it husked her voice.

“What if you get born a raspberry?” Emmett asked.

Lennie wouldn’t answer a question that was negligently aimed at her cosmology. Saucily, she sighed and asked him, “What if you get born a robin? What if you get born a dragonfly? What if you get born a ladybug, what if you get born a bee, what if you get born an ant?”

Rising with the plates, he asked her, “What were you before you were born?” The look of dread on her face made him hurriedly clear the table, sorry.

Suzanne’s stomach was taut; he could see the muscle through her bathing suit. She’d put on one of his tattered white shirts to come to breakfast and now she let it fall open as she leaned back in her chair and pushed her plate toward him, crossing her tanned legs. “That was good.” Unfazed. Her blue eyes full of light. Then while he was filling the sink, she came behind him and wrapped her warm body around his back. “Why don’t you take a break,” she offered and nudged him out of the way.

They’d had a storm that had ripped some shingle off the boathouse. He looked among the debris stored under the cottage to find a package of spare shingles and began to set himself up to make the repair. He thought about his son, James, and the life he was leading without his father. He wondered what it would be like to have a boy about the place, and whether the money was getting to Aoi, who never wrote back.

He discovered that a joist had rotted, which led to another search to discover some dry lumber stacked on a canoe rack and wrapped in a canvas tarp. Caterpillars had sewn white sacs to the canvas, it smelled sweet with mildew, he pulled the pliable silk cocoons off with his hands. Wild rose grew here, under the deck, in the parallel lines of sun shining through, they scratched his bare legs with their thorns.

He hauled a four-by-six from under the cottage and then found the handsaw and carried it all down to the dock. The saw was dull, the job took forever, and he had to stop for a beer when he was halfway through, partly from thirst and partly to put out the fire that burned in his head.

It was nearly time for lunch, but he got the paint-splattered stepladder from the shed and carried it inside the boathouse to position it beside the boat slips where Suzanne’s runabout and the nine-horse were moored. The gulping sound of the boats when waves rolled in. Sweet golden shade rippling. With his dull saw, he began to cut away the rotted wood.

The lumber was soggy but nice to touch, fibres coming loose in his hands, splinters of ruddy blond wood softened by the rains. It smelled good in there. Jerry cans of gas and tins of outboard motor oil. At his left ear poised a leathery black spider the size of a small mouse. The portion of rotten wood fell into his hands.

“Whatcha doin’?” Lennie stood at the doorway to the boathouse, peering in.

“Fixing the roof.” He looked down where she stood in a hot slab of sunlight, her T-shirt a sweet pink against the bleached wood of the dock and the blue water behind her. He was enchanted by her lucidity, her remotely attuned attention; she was a tuning fork.

She inhaled the rich fumy shade. “How come you’re fixing the roof if you’re standing inside?” She sighed patiently. “Anyways, Mum says it’s lunch.”

He leaned from his stepladder and handed Lennie the soggy piece of pine, which she accepted without flinching. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Put it under your pillow.”

They went up to the cottage for lunch. Lennie pondered his suggestion. She didn’t like to ask for clarification. He worried that this was something that might cause her trouble later in life, a competitive streak that could make her reject her teachers. She still carried the rotten wood; it was smearing her T-shirt. He took it from her. “Here,” he said, “I’ll throw it on the wood pile.”

“You were kidding about putting it under my pillow, right?”

“Yup.”

“I knew you were.”

They had lunch in the veranda, where it was cooler. Suzanne remained calmly abstracted. He wanted to interfere with her. His young daughter swung her legs under her chair and hummed tunelessly while she devoured an entire cucumber.

 

Chapter Seven

“It’s all right,” Suzanne said irritably, “it’s absolutely fine and dandy.”

A cool Thanksgiving Monday and they were closing the cottage. Emmett handed down to the boat another box of foodstuff that they didn’t want to leave in the cupboards for the winter. “It’s heavy,” he told her, but she ignored him and nearly dropped the box. Her girlhood was especially evident in the way she performed tasks like this, the lake chores that she’d been performing all her life. She slid her jacket off and swung her arms toward him to receive the next load.

Another trade junket had come up for Emmett. He’d been given an assignment, another grease-the-wheel junket with some fellows from Trade and Commerce. This time to Japan.

The trip coincided with Emmett’s desire to see his son, James. And it followed closely Robert Morton’s unusual disclosure of the “Jones Files,” with its casual inclusion of a photograph of the boy. Bill Masters had gurgled with pleasure in giving him the news of the impending trip, pretending that this was exactly what Jones had been asking for, as if it were a foreign posting and not another trade mission. Not another set-up.

Though Emmett didn’t know if the Japan trip really was a play by External’s Security section, another test of his loyalty. Maybe he was being paranoid. Bill Masters’s happy croaking could be real. Two Canadian companies were selling technical knowledge to Kobe Steel Works. Emmett was the only man at External who knew Kobe Japan and could act as interpreter. That’s why he’d been chosen to go along. That’s how Bill Masters had phrased it.

Now Emmett was saying to Suzanne, “I’d like it better if you and Lennie were coming with me,” but he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know what his real role was going to be in Japan, but he knew it wasn’t Husband.

Suzanne said, “I don’t want Lennie to know about you and — Japan.”

“She’s got to know where I am.” He had a terror of disappearing from Lennie’s life when she didn’t know where he was.

“Why?”

“Why? Why would you ask me something like that?”

“It’ll upset her.”

“It’s only business, Suzanne.”

“And family. It’s your family, Emmett. Yours. Not mine.”

“It’s Lennie’s family too.” He heaved a box of leftover liquor toward her.

Suzanne, stricken, let the box drop to the floorboards. A crack. The smell of gin.

He cursed quietly. He’d been thinking this, an angry sentence in his own head: It’s my son, as Lenore is my daughter.

Lennie’s voice from the lawn, “What are you two fighting about anyways?”

“We’re not fighting.” Mother and Father in unison. Then he said, “I have to go to Japan.”

Suzanne sat down, that gesture: I’m washing my hands of the whole affair.

“Now?” Lennie asked.

“Next week.”

“Are you going to go get James?”

“No. I’m not. James lives with his mother in Kobe. And he’s going to want to stay there.”

“What if he wants to come home with you?”

“He won’t want to. He wouldn’t want to leave his mother, would he?”

Lenore glanced at her mother, considering. “I don’t know. I don’t know his mother.”

Suzanne asked whether or not Lenore had packed all her Enid Blyton books.

“Can we swim before we go to the city?” Lennie asked, deflecting.

“It’ll be cold.”

“I know.” Lennie stomped down the stairs to the dock, peeling off her clothes, standing shivering in her underwear. “Come on.”

She would be a marriage counsellor, he imagined a moment later, treading water in the icy lake with Lennie and Suzanne, exhilarated, the argument on hold.

Her lips were turning blue. Suzanne herded her toward the ladder. “Time to get out.”

“Why aren’t we coming?” Lennie asked.

“It’s too expensive.” This was more or less true. “I wish you were coming, you and your mother. But we can’t afford it.”

“It’s around the world,” Suzanne said. She was being helpful. “It would cost way too much for us to go with Daddy.”

Lenore hadn’t called him Daddy since she was three so she knew her mother was lying.

“You can send James a letter with Daddy.”

“Don’t call him Daddy.”

 

Chapter Eight

Before dawn on the morning of his departure for Japan, Emmett descended the stairs of his home in Ottawa. It was cold. He wore pyjama bottoms. His upper body and feet were bare. He went to the kitchen, to the drawer where they kept candles and a flashlight in case of blackouts, and removed the flashlight. Then he went to the hall cupboard and got his coat and went out by the back door to the garage, entering by the crooked wooden door.

They normally squeezed the Alfa Romeo in beside the new Parisienne. A couple of days ago, he’d noticed a scratch in the Alfa’s paint and had persuaded Suzanne to take it in for bodywork, arguing that they should get it repaired while he was out of the country. He didn’t like for Suzanne to be noticeable when he wasn’t here to watch out for her, and the Parisienne would be harder to follow.

In the concrete floor of the old garage, mostly obscured by a patch of oil that had leaked from the old car, was a latch. He bent down and tugged at it. A bit of dirt and oil shifted. He yanked harder and a door lifted, a hatch. He laid the hatch back on the floor of the garage and shone the flashlight down. It was like a root cellar, though it wasn’t intended for turnips and potatoes but for liquor; a wine cellar built during Prohibition.

He climbed backward down the narrow wooden stairs to the cellar, his hand groping the damp walls till he found a piece of string wrapped around a nail; he gave the string a pull and a bulb lit up. He laid the flashlight on one of the empty shelves. It smelled of mud in here. The walls of the cellar were made of red brick. On a pallet raised from the floor was a wood barrel stamped with the Seagram’s insignia. The lid of the barrel sat askew. He slid the lid aside and set it against the barrel. The top layer was straw. Beneath that was his old tripod, placed over a waterproof satchel. He put the tripod and the satchel aside and leaned into the barrel.

When Robert Morton had put Emmett’s files into his hands more than three months ago, Morton had instructed Grey, the rabbity little man who cried in the sun, to take Emmett home. Morton had stayed behind, as had the two plainclothes officers there to witness the delivery of the subject’s files. A rare event, such generous disclosure; quite out of the ordinary. En route from the reclusive old house with its groundskeeper’s cottage where this last interview had taken place, Grey had engaged Emmett in an odd conversation.

As they drove the several miles, Grey, his face squeezed against the sunlight, sweating in his oversized wool suit, had grown increasingly agitated. He kept looking in the rear-view mirror at Emmett in the backseat. He removed his hat, ran his hand over sparse blond hair, and finally said, “He’s just letting you go.”

Emmett said that yes, he was going home. He didn’t feel confident in Grey’s driving, being so blinded by light. He asked him, “You remember the way?”

Grey didn’t answer. After several minutes Grey repeated in a tone of incredulity, “Just like that. He fucking lets you go.”

Now it was Emmett’s turn to be unresponsive. The leather briefcase was heavy on his lap, and he embraced it even while he knew it was meaningless; there would be duplicates with the RCMP, triplicates with the FBI. The files were merely mementos. Grey was muttering, “He lets you go, he fucking lets you go.”

When the black Buick finally rolled onto Emmett’s street, he instructed Grey not to pull up at the front door of his house but to take him around, down the lane, and drop him off at the back gate. But Grey ignored him and pulled up out front, and then, as if this would further injure Emmett, he pulled into the driveway, braking with a sudden lurch.

Emmett couldn’t get out of the car without Grey’s assistance because there was no door handle. Grey turned in his seat to look at him. “You make me sick,” he said.

“Open the door and we’ll part ways.”

“I want to puke when I look at you.”

“Open the door.”

“I fought for my country,” Grey said. “I nearly got killed. Buddies of mine, they got killed.”

“Yeah, well, it was a war.”

Now Grey’s tears seemed caused by grief. He said, “I nearly lost my balls in the fight for freedom.”

Emmett smiled a little. “Open the door.”

“Faggot.”

“Sticks and stones.”

“Commie faggot.”

“Lieutenant Morton will be expecting you to report that you got me here safely. Are you sure you can find your way back?”

“Morton?” Grey scoffed. “I got a more important boss than that dumb fuck.”

“Sure you do.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. Only, you have ambitions.” Grey began to listen with that greed to be known by another. Emmett said, “You go way beyond this town. You’re even working with men outside the country. The RCMP don’t know about all the work you’re doing. Important work. For freedom.”

“How do you know?”

“Morton told me.”

“He doesn’t know!”

Emmett smiled.

Grey wiped the tears from the side of his face. “I should shoot you. Not right now. When the time is right.”

“Open the door.”

“I should shoot your whole family.”

“Open the door. I’ll take my souvenirs and you’ll never see me again.”

“Oh. Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.” Grey got out of the car. He was coming around, sullen and frustrated to have to let Jones go free, when the door to the house opened and Suzanne rushed out. Lenore tried to follow her and Suzanne shrieked at her to go back, pushing her inside the house and then stumbling down the front steps. She was weeping. She stopped cold when she saw Grey standing between her and the car and cried, “Give me back my husband!”

Inside the car, Emmett was calling her to go back inside. He could sense Grey’s thrill, Grey’s pleasure. Suzanne made a movement toward the car and Grey stepped toward her, Emmett shouting, “Leave it!” Suzanne finally looked at him, then at Grey, and backed up toward the house.

Grey opened the car door, shaking; he actually reeked, a sharp burnt stink came from him. Grey’s voice, trembling, “I seen her,” he said triumphantly, “I seen her in lots of ways.” Emmett got out of the car, carrying the heavy briefcase. Grey’s face was pink and wet. “Your lady friend.”

“My wife.”

“Sick fuck,” Grey said. “I tailed her for years ’n years.” He put his hand in the shape of a gun, aimed at where Suzanne stood, and said, “Pow.”

Emmett walked quickly to his house and propelled Suzanne inside. Suzanne was still crying, but Lenore was seated primly on the couch wearing a grey cotton dress, her birthday dress, with white bobby socks and her new shiny black shoes; she sat gravely but dry-eyed, like Alice in Wonderland, beyond surprise. Emmett slid the briefcase into the hall closet behind the coats and then he watched the street from behind the drapes until the Buick had cruised slowly out of sight.

Later that night he’d take the briefcase out to the garage and put it into the trunk of the Alfa, to leave it there till he could hide it in the vault under the garage. The encounter with the Rabbit had so frightened Suzanne, she hadn’t noticed the briefcase. He’d managed to calm her down, getting lunch on the table for her and Lennie, pouring wine for Suzanne, telling her that the meeting had been a formality, just a formality to mark the end of the investigation, it was really good news, the true end of the investigation, and yes, wasn’t that driver a bizarre little man, poor guy, really you have to feel sorry for him in a way, still shell-shocked, a war vet who never got over it, we’ll never see him again.

 

Emmett hadn’t destroyed any of the files, though the transcripts and many of the photographs were painful to look at. But air travel, especially of the kind afforded by the Canadian government, was a risky affair. He had to try to see it all through Suzanne’s eyes, should anything happen to him on this trip to Japan.

He leaned and dug deep into the barrel till he got a grip on the heavy leather briefcase so generously donated to him by the RCMP, clutching it to his chest, bringing up his cold bare feet with their traces of motor oil till he was sitting cross-legged on the bare wooden bench. Then he began his own, personal analysis of the Jones files.

It took forty minutes because he lingered over the almost-forgotten moments. Suzanne, and then Aoi, each of them photographed in the snow. He would not destroy much of it, but he did make certain selections for disposal. Morton had given him the originals of the photographs, he knew, because they’d not excised the logo of the RCMP’s film shop. This meant exactly nothing.

 

Chapter Nine

Emmett said goodbye to his family at Ottawa’s Uplands airport. Dr. Kimura had insisted on driving them. Emmett had to ask him, “How can you take a Tuesday morning away from your practice?”

Kimura said, “I left by the back door.”

“Your patients don’t know you’re gone?”

“They’re accustomed to waiting.” Kimura winked at Lennie. He was being very merry.

Emmett could see the apertures in Kimura’s eyes open and shut as he switched from true to feigned merriment. The doctor had kept in contact only by mail with the sister he’d left behind in Kobe; he had not returned to Japan since the night when he and Emmett had got into the brawl that ended with the death of a Japanese policeman. He said that he preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, and refused to leave Canada; this trip to Japan that Emmett was undertaking filled him with misgivings. Emmett had told him that it was irrational to worry about a bar fight so many years ago. Obviously the crime was never to be solved; no one would now be able to connect them with the policeman’s death. Kimura agreed, this was rational, but “I believe that some lives must move in one direction only; I will never go back.”

Emmett flew to Kobe, the city of his birth, in the company of some fellows from Trade and Commerce. It caught the imagination of the civil service that Canada would deal in know-how, pure as sunlight. He was appointed as a translator, though he would soon discover that the Kobe Steel men spoke perfect English.

 

Aoi said that he could meet her at the seaside and that she would bring James. He arrived to find her on the pier. An onshore wind was blowing. Her uncommon beauty was more austere than it had been nearly ten years ago. She was self-possessed, a totem, her face like carved cypress while her skirt tussled in the wind. Her clothing was modern, but it was the same black and ochre of the Manchurian cloak she’d been wearing the last time he’d seen her. She seemed taller, more statuesque than he remembered. She gave a dignified bow, establishing that Emmett would not be permitted to come close. He felt ashamed at the way he’d left her, and embarrassed that he’d imagined she might thank him for the money he sent.

Far from shore a flock of children swam with strong expert strokes past the surf, out to the green roll of the waves, their cries carried on the wind.

“That one,” said Aoi, proudly pointing. Emmett’s eyes followed the fastest swimmer. She pointed insistently, “That one,” toward the pack of swimmers; with their dark heads in the water, they could be seals. And there was his son. One among them, strongly swimming but not the strongest.

“They swim so far out!” He wanted to say, Please call him back! How can she so calmly watch the boy risk his life?

The children rose and fell with the waves, their naked shoulders gleaming. The sea swells lifted them together to let them fall together. Even from this distance he could see their joy. The sight of his son pierced him with love and pride, an elation that also brought a spasm of grief for his own father, and he dimly understood why, understanding perhaps for the first time just how much his father must have loved him.

But he had a meeting that same afternoon with the men involved in the Kobe Steel agreement. And this evening there was a dinner-party arranged by the ambassador. Aoi sensed his distraction, turned full to face him, and in English she said, “You have things to do.” Now he was convinced, it was the old Manchurian cloak stylishly remade, the wind rippling its rich black fabrics, its ochre braid, all of Aoi’s magnificent physique given to motion but for the lacquered hair. Her moon face, her big mouth, sensuous and unapproachable.

Speech between them in any language was impossible; there was too much to say. What has it been like for you, raising a boy alone? A boy fathered by a gaijin. He could not touch her, but he was desperate to touch his son. He asked Aoi, “Can you call him?”

He had forgotten her vocal training with the biwa, the masculine, glottal Japanese by which she called over the windy waves. A boy in the surf stopped, hearing her voice. Emmett could see his excitement, see him shout to his friends and start swimming toward the beach, the other boys following, half a dozen boys racing to their towels to dry their faces, running up the steps to the pier.

The boys crowded around James, who presented himself before this western man. He was nine years old, no longer childish. He did not look like Aoi very much; his features were more proportionate, his beauty more conventional. He was tall and boldly shy; the victory Emmett liked so much in his mother shone in his eyes. Again speaking English, Aoi said, “This is your father.”

The other boys pushed James’s shoulders, but he held his place, his upright posture. He did not act like a fatherless child; he showed confidence. With a steady voice, Emmett told him that he was very glad to see him. James thanked him in Japanese, his eyes darting to Aoi for a prompt.

Emmett’s hands started to shake, and he thrust them into his pockets, but somehow this gesture seemed offhand or disrespectful, so he brought them out again, visibly shaking, and tentatively touched James’s shoulder. The boy responded with a guileless smile.

Aoi made a sound Emmett couldn’t quite decipher, and James, with all the boys flying around him, shot off, back toward the beach, James with special consciousness, as if crowned with laurel.

“Can I possibly see him again?”

The slightest flinch in Aoi, a tremor. He didn’t dare consider how much he might have hurt her.

“You don’t have to,” he told her. “You don’t have to let me see him.” He couldn’t bring himself to say that he was sorry; it was impossible to apologize for the shame he must have incurred by not returning to her before he left Japan, the difficulties she must have encountered. He’d convinced himself that Aoi was cold toward him, that she was sublimely self-sufficient. That she conveniently would not love him, so he could love Suzanne pleasurably. He’d ridden another wave of illusion. But now he was again awake.

He said, “The money I send doesn’t give me the right to see James.” He wished it did, and he wished that James would think so one day.

Aoi looked at him. She wasn’t cold, she was lucid, and her lucidity made her generous — he remembered the small portion of rice she’d offered to him the night they first met. He remembered her with his blind body.

 

Chapter Ten

There was a man present at every turn at the American ambassador’s dinner party who introduced himself as Jim Smith and claimed he was from an insurance outfit in New Jersey, but Emmett couldn’t guess his function. When he tried to find out, the man waved his hands in front of Emmett’s face and said, “Ho, friendly Canadian, I’m strictly an observer.” At dinner, Jim Smith was seated beside the ambassador, who was seated to the right of Ikeda Hayato, minister of trade and industry.

Emmett took his seat at Ikeda’s left. Ikeda was stern, greying, with thin, peevish lips. Emmett politely observed, “I understand Kobe Steel will open offices in New York next year. That’s a lot of growth.” Ikeda merely grunted without turning his head.

He was rebuked, though the Kobe men had boasted of their developments in America and in Germany, rebelliously intent to show off their internationalism. Emmett looked down the table past Ikeda’s blunt grey face and caught the eye of Jim Smith — a lanky man, fair-skinned with light pinfeather hair and sharp, friendly eyes. Jim Smith’s tuxedo bagged a little as if he’d recently lost weight; he put his elbow on the table to rest his chin on his fist, and winked — or it was that kind of blinking smile that makes winks inevitable.

A voice came from his left. “Try the duck.”

Emmett turned to look at his neighbour, a genial Japanese man with a full head of white hair and a broad flat nose. He looked to be in his late fifties and in excellent health. Unlike most of the men at the table, he didn’t wear glasses. He had moist red lips and a wide cheerful smile that revealed a set of false teeth. Emmett had seen him before but couldn’t yet place him.

A waiter stationed behind them bent forward to insert a tray of duck prepared in the Chinese fashion, and his neighbour repeated, “Try it. It’s good.” He introduced himself, “I am Kazuo Takiji,” looking Jones over.

Emmett remembered Kazuo now. Kazuo had been senior in the Yakuza hierarchy in 1950, when Emmett had used his position of policy analyst to look into the influence of the Japanese gangsters on Japan’s Liberal Party. Kazuo was then running several gangs in the Kobe region, as a rising member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the biggest Yakuza family. Apparently he’d been successful.

“We have many outsiders coming to Japan now,” Kazuo was saying. “‘The post-war is over!’” He began to laugh. “Have you heard that expression, Mr. Jones?” Emmett was aware of the minister of trade and industry to his right, of Ikeda’s base rate of disapproval. “It is the genius of Mr. Ikeda to coin that phrase, is it not? ‘The post-war is over!’”

Ikeda said nothing, did not even look.

“And now my old friend Kishi is playing golf with President Eisenhower,” Kazuo continued.

Kishi Nobusuke. Kishi was a Class-A war criminal, discharged after more than two years in jail, driven away from Sugamo Prison in an American army jeep. Now Kishi was prime minister of Japan, playing golf with Eisenhower.

“We are all friendly here.” Kazuo Takiji wore a dinner jacket rather than a tuxedo, a rich fabric with satin lapels. The French cuffs of his white shirt extended below the sleeves of his jacket so as to cover his wrists almost to the base of his thumb. It would look comical if it weren’t so deliberate. His shirt collar recalled the regency style, rising high around his neck.

Emmett asked about Kazuo’s involvement in Kobe Steel.

Kazuo’s smile hung in the air while Kazuo himself withdrew from such intemperate curiosity. “I am a philanthropist,” he said.

Emmett indicated with a nod, That’s nice, retreating into the mask of Canadian civil servant. “I’m sure you do much good work.”

Kazuo gave a broad smile with his false teeth. A wet smile that hid nothing of its own cynicism, it struck Emmett as vulgar. Kazuo reached to the centre of the table for a carafe of sake, a gesture that tugged at the long sleeves of his dress shirt, revealing a tattoo swirling around his wrist. He was aware that Emmett had noticed, and when he resumed his seat, he tipped his head and Emmett saw what he was intended to see: a swirl of coloured ink on Kazuo’s neck. It was a custom of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, to tattoo their entire bodies. He felt the strangeness of Kazuo’s dragon skin beneath the expensive suit.

While Kazuo drank and ate, he talked, ostensibly to Emmett but loudly enough so Ikeda could hear. The subject was “philanthropy,” Kazuo making much use of the English word, which — as Emmett began to drink with him — took on mongrel shapes. Emmett mildly observed that it had never occurred to him that motorboat racing could be conceived as philanthropic.

The smile vanished. In a deep loud voice, Kazuo said, “You are a socialist.” This was intended as an insult. “Communist,” Kazuo insisted.

At the end of the table, Jim Smith in his oversized tuxedo broke into laughter and called, “Mr. Kazuo! Are you tormenting our friendly Canadian?” Jim Smith stood.

Kazuo looked at Jim Smith and, after a short pause, switched to English. “Who is this twig? He does not approve of boat-racing!”

“Well hang him for a prude,” said Jim Smith.

Emmett said, “I’m with External Affairs, Mr. Kazuo. The Canadian government.”

Contempt swept quickly over Kazuo’s face. “Does this mean you have no ideas of your own? Maybe you are a good subject of your emperor!” Then he smiled again. His wet red mouth.

Kazuo and Jim Smith laughed. Emmett looked across the table to his counterpart in Trade and Commerce, Clark Haywood. Haywood gave him a wary look and addressed himself to the Kobe Steel man seated beside him, putting his hand around his face to block his view of Jones squirming between the paws of the Japanese mafia.

Kazuo loudly addressed the table, “Such sentiment! The kokutai has been punished! Not to the liking of President Truman! Punished by fire! Burnt to ash by the inhuman bombs! Now what do you do? You mimic us.”

Ikeda muttered in Japanese, “This will wait for another occasion.”

“But life is fleeting!” Kazuo persisted, then mockingly to Emmett, “like cherry blossoms.” And laughed with what Emmett hoped was greater goodwill. “I am an ambassador, just as our host is an ambassador!”

The Canadian ambassador turned grimly to Emmett and then was startled when he felt something touch his back. It was the hand of Jim Smith touching the ambassador while he walked past, coming toward Emmett now, his black dress shoes gleaming. Smith leaned down to say in Emmett’s ear, “How about we go somewhere we can talk quietly about our divine differences?” He firmly pulled Emmett’s chair away from the table.

Emmett was aware of Clark Haywood’s pale face and the silence that had overtaken the place. The ambassador began to get out of his chair, Ikeda preventing him with a light touch to the arm while he murmured reassurance.

Jim Smith made an elaborate show of thanking his host. “I’m borrowing your guest for a couple of hours, Mr. Ambassador. I promise to get him back to his hotel a healthy man.”

The ambassador nodded curtly. “I have your word on that, Jim.”

Emmett, flanked by Kazuo Takiji and Jim Smith from New Jersey, considered his options. He didn’t think that Smith and Kazuo would actually hurt him; nobody wanted an international incident. This was the clue he’d been waiting for: what is his role on this trade mission? He was curious and invigorated with sake-courage. He bowed to Ikeda and to the ambassador and said good night.

 

Chapter Eleven

Emmett, who at eleven years of age had twice tried to join a kendo club and twice a karate club and had been rejected every time because he was a westerner, soon was watching karate at one of Kazuo’s special nightclubs. He responded with warm admiration. It was wise to show respect to the don. He hadn’t had any contact with Japanese gangsters since his time with the Liaison Mission in Tokyo. And he’d never had an evening on the town as the guest of one. Some of Kazuo’s mannerisms reminded him of a man he’d dealt with briefly in Ottawa, a devout French Catholic making a fortune building bridges and highways, the same bull-chested, powerful build, the generosity with money, the physical affection for the men in his employ. Kazuo’s staff at the club obviously loved and respected him.

At his karate club, the old gangster was surrounded by younger men of extraordinary refinement and sincerity. Emmett watched for excess, bravado, bullying, and saw instead a keen, clear balance, finely pitched. He’d almost forgotten the particularly pure intensity of young Japanese men.

At this late hour the matches were for the masters, while the acolytes watched. The place was lit like a theatre or a nightclub, with white-hot footlights and stark spots on a low stage. The white uniforms blurred with movement. Each engagement lasted no more than a minute, a brief flurry to the deathblow, then withdrawal. Mesmerizing variations of kihon, feints and kicks, the hoarse shout, disengagement.

Kazuo lit a cigar and strolled off into the darkness that surrounded the stage, leaving Emmett alone with Jim from the New Jersey insurance company. Jim pulled a flask from his pocket and poured whisky into Emmett’s tea before adding some to his own. “These places were illegal after the war,” he said. “We weren’t too keen on Japs doing martial arts.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“Our ban was lifted in ’52. You were gone by then.”

Emmett’s face didn’t reveal any surprise at Jim’s knowledge of his history. He said, “That’s right. I was back in Canada.” He was thinking, Jim probably knows that the Canadian government has sold me off, given my personal files to the FBI. That would be what had brought me to Jim’s attention, whoever Jim really is.

Jim was watching the match. Emmett added, “I think I’ll hit the road.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll say goodnight to Mr. Kazuo.” He finished his spiked tea and stood to go. “Thanks for the nightcap.”

“Sit down.”

Emmett sat down again, and Jim poured more whisky into his cup. “You were on your way to a pretty good position on the Southeast Asia desk when they pulled you. Why’d they do that?”

“How do you know about this?”

Jim shrugged. “It’s my job.”

“You’re not with Prudential.”

“Nope.” Jim smiled boyishly. He didn’t apply that allknowing irony, the smirking one-upmanship Emmett had come to associate with snoops. “So?” Jim said. “What happened in 1951, made you fall down the ladder?”

“Sounds like you already know the whole story.”

“There’s never a whole story, is there.”

“My name came up. You know that part, I imagine.”

“Sure. But why? You a communist?”

“No.”

“Just when we need men with some real understanding over here, my government fires everybody who knows anything about Southeast Asia. So now what are we going to do? Let ’em have their goddamn war in peace?”

Jim was talking about Vietnam. But the war wasn’t yet official. Emmett said nothing. He had a fleeting impulse to point out that it wasn’t Jim’s government that had “fired” him.

Jim grumbled, “We wouldn’t be backing Diem if we had anybody with any brains making policy. But” — shrugging good naturedly — “who listens?”

Jim’s manner was expansive; he appeared to be worldly and disinterested. He asked Emmett if he’d like to work in Asia, in South Vietnam, saying, “It’s a nice place if you can stay out of trouble.” When Emmett didn’t answer, Jim went on, “They’re keeping you out. Aren’t they? But you know, there are other ways to skin a cat.”

“I don’t think I’m interested in cutting loose from External.”

“Why not?” Jim emptied the flask into Emmett’s cup. “You don’t like risk?”

“Are you suggesting some kind of — consultancy?”

“That’s one word for it,” Jim said, smiling. “Hasn’t anybody ever approached you till now? Seems hard to believe. Not even when you were stationed in Tokyo? Before you got tangled up in the McCarthy circus?”

“I like working as an analyst.” Emmett was watching the match when he said this. All Jim could see of his eyes was the light from the stage glancing off his glasses.

Jim leaned back in his chair to view Emmett better. He said, “You have a talent for finding the little pieces, putting them together so they make sense. You’re a rare bird, Mr. Jones.” He was exaggerating. Emmett knew he was intended to understand that he had a reputation extending further than anyone had ever let him know. He wondered just how much Jim knew about him. “Tell me,” Jim went on, “what do you think’s going to happen in Vietnam?”

Here was a test. Emmett said, “I think the Lao Dong party is going to step up an insurgency.” It was a relief to use his mind, a cold relief from the heat of his frustrations. But he was sure now that he was being played, and he told himself not to fuck it up by getting angry.

Jim was nodding thoughtfully.

Emmett went on, calmly analytic, a policy analyst. “Hanoi waited a long time for a political solution. It never came. It could have. But the moment passed. President Diem is a dictator. Something like” — he glanced around the club looking for Kazuo — “not far off from our friend here, but more dangerous. Maybe even crazy. Now the Vietcong have been pushed to the extreme. They’ll get backing from the Politburo. They’ll go to war. And it’ll be like a bushfire, impossible to put out.” He was reiterating the observations he’d made in his memorandum to Prime Minister Diefenbaker, but here in the gangster’s karate club the information felt more powerful.

Jim whistled. “Are you sure you’re not already working for us?”

Emmett caught the bait, us, ignored it, and said, “I’m talking too much.” He had used bait of his own; he wanted to know who Jim Smith worked for.

“How’d you come to such dire conclusions, Mr. Jones?”

“Osmosis.”

“You sure are a puzzle.”

Emmett didn’t respond. A match had ended with a shout. Now a man in his twenties faced his much older opponent. They circled and engaged.

For a while Jim seemed intent on watching the white blur of action. Then he clicked his tongue wistfully and said, “Here, you find what remains of the old Samurai ways. The Bushido. Perfect raw material for evil bastards like Kishi. Like Ikeda. Like our good friend Kazuo. If there was one, if there was one first crime in the war, it was in corrupting a fine old tradition.” Jim returned his attention to Emmett. “You ever noticed, how one thing always contains its opposite?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.”

Jim put his elbows on the table, his hands pressed together so his chin rested on his thumbs. “A man’s strength is also his weakness. Same with a system. The greatest systems on earth carry the germ of their own destruction.

“Let me ask you something,” Jim went on. “It’s pure speculation and it won’t cost you a cent.”

“Go ahead.” Emmett took a drink.

“I happen to know you for a specialist when it comes to Japan. You know more than most civilians about the whole Asia problem.”

Emmett was about to demur, but Jim cut him off, “You know a lot about Bushido.”

“I’ve read about it,” Emmett said and laughed.

But Jim remained serious, slightly ponderous, as if he’d had too much to drink. “The principles these karate masters live by. Makoto and all that.”

“Yes.” Emmett felt that he was more sober than Jim was. He corrected Jim’s pronunciation. “Makoto,” he said, “yes.”

“Say you had to choose one principle, one virtue out of all the virtues. What would it be?” Jim asked.

Emmett thought about it. Makoto is admirable. Truthfulness, sincerity. In a child. Sincerity can make you a fool; it can make you delusional. Duplicity, compassionate duplicity, is a more natural skill in a man with real integrity. He recalled several of the other Japanese words associated with Bushido. Yuki, for one: bravery, heroism. With a quiet surge of love he thought about Suzanne, he thought about Lenore, and James, his son. He thought about the abiding love and stubborn hope that had driven him, and the loneliness of his position. His private life was an endurance test. His heroism, if he dared call it that, existed in his loves.

He let Jim wait a moment and then he said, “Chugi. It means loyalty. Devotion. But in Japanese terms. It doesn’t quite translate. But yes, I would say, chugi. That is what I live by.”

Jim was watching him with bleary, unfocused eyes. He seemed quite drunk; he showed the drunk’s tendency to hear too much in what is being simply expressed. He slurringly repeated, “Chugi.”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Loyalty.”

“That’s right.”

“Devotion.”

“Yes.”

Jim sat back in his chair, vaguely astonished. “I would’ve thought, given the cards that’ve been dealt you, you’d’ve come to quite a different conclusion.”

“And what would that be?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Your country accuses you of being a traitor. You stand up to them. You stand up and clear your name. You retain your honour. You don’t cave.”

“Yes.”

Jim said, “Don’t you ever want to break away? I mean, even in your own mind? You have been betrayed. And you play loyal public servant?” Jim hit the table with the palm of his hand and repeated, “Betrayed.”

“That’s my own affair.”

“I don’t dispute it. What I don’t get is why you haven’t struck out on your own. With what you know, your languages, your background. With what you’ve learned the hard way, how things work, how things can swing against you, easy as a blade to the heart. Why not break for it? Chugi,” he added contemptuously, “it’s for amateurs. Inferiors.”

“I don’t think you understand how the principles of Bushido work.”

“Meiyo,” Jim said. His accent was alarming but was close enough. Now it was Emmett’s turn to feel contemptuous. “Meiyo,” Jim repeated more loudly.

“I understand.”

“Glory!” Jim said loudly. “Glory! What else is worth fighting for? What else but glory drives great men? Civilization might dissolve into a puddle of piss, but there will still be the few, the few men strong enough to abide by the principle of meiyo!”

The expression was so baldly hyperbolic, he wondered if Jim was joking. Jim’s eyes slid sideways to look at him. He now appeared to be entirely sober. “Like I said. You are a puzzle, Emmett Jones.”

“A boring sort of puzzle then.”

“Boring.” Jim snorted. “That’s quite clever.”

“I assure you, what you see is a loyal civil servant.”

Jim snorted. “Okay.”

“Do I present anything other than the well-mannered profile of a devoted subject of the Dominion?”

“Not for a minute.”

“There.” Emmett finished the whisky in his cup. “You promised the ambassador you’d see me safely back to my hotel.”

Jim stood. “I’ll tell our host that you’re leaving.”

“Thank you.”

Jim left him alone at the table. Ten minutes passed and Jim reappeared and said, “A driver’s outside.”

He thanked Jim without further question, and was making his way to the door when he heard Jim say, “I suggest you stay home tonight.”

He turned.

“I’m suggesting you call it a night. No wandering around all on your lonesome.” Jim’s winking smile insinuated ownership, domination.

“Yes,” Emmett waved vaguely. “Good night, Jim.”

 

Chapter Twelve

Emmett held his hat in his hands while Aoi ushered him into her suite and guided him to a western-style living room with a plush white carpet, white leather furniture, and a glass coffee table. He’d always associated her with the old house on the estate, and now he was disoriented to see her here, in this chic apartment that looked like outer space. He was her guest for lunch. He had come as a modest saviour, prepared to reassess his contributions to her household. He’d brought his chequebook.

He was careful not to cut his shins on the glass while he navigated, dizzy with light, toward the sofa. Aoi kneeled at the table. He was fascinated by her eyes, the winged black eyeliner, the false eyelashes. She wore narrow black pants and a white blouse with a scarf at her throat, maybe playing the part of an Italian moll. A cigarette case sat beside a matching lighter on the glass table, as if suspended in mid-air. She opened it and offered him a cigarette. He declined and she took one for herself. He’d never seen her smoke before. She gave him one of her frank looks, a candid mockery of her own poses.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him.

“Is James going to join us?”

“My cook has prepared your favourite meal.”

“Thank you.” You have a cook? he wondered. The suite was spare of ornament, except for a fine woodblock print, and the dining room table set with Chinese porcelain. And a beautiful Kakejiku, a silk scroll, herons in reeds with snow, trembling slightly as if with age.

Aoi saw him admiring the scroll and said, “Meiji-era.” Then she said, “Mackerel. Miso. Stewed cherries. I remember what you like.”

The fan whirred soothingly. The apartment block was on a busy street but soundproof. He said, “You look beautiful.” She laughed. “And James,” he persisted, leaning toward her. He liked the smell of cigarettes. “He’s happy?”

“You saw him.” She smiled to indicate that yes, he’s obviously happy.

“When will he be joining us?”

“In a moment. I told him I want to speak with you alone first.”

“All right.” He waited.

She dragged on her cigarette and then stamped it out carefully with her polished hands. Quietly she asked, “Do you wonder how I manage so well?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But you don’t owe me an explanation. I still want to contribute to his care.”

She acknowledged this with a slight bow of the head. “It’s not necessary. Your money.”

“It’s necessary to me,” he said.

And she nodded again, declining to press him on the measure of his guilt in abandoning her. “I have a profession,” Aoi said.

“Yes, I thought you must.”

“I work for the Americans. Since the war, I’ve worked for the Americans.”’

He remembered a blue kimono passing in near darkness on the road past Sachiko’s house.

“At first I had nothing and needed their protection,” she said. “They trained me in financial services. Now I’m useful to them. They want the government to go a certain way, I help them.”

Emmett thought of New Jersey, the craggy head with its light pinfeathers, and observed, “The Americans are involved with the deal we’re arranging with Kobe Steel.”

“They’re involved with everything. Everything is an American deal with Kishi. The Americans want the LDP to run the country forever.”

The Liberal Democratic Party. America’s choice of Japanese governments. Prime Minister Kishi playing golf with President Eisenhower.

“I invest the Americans’ money in various companies that I create,” she said. “They pay me a good commission!” She laughed quietly, frowning. “I’m being very candid with you, Emmett.”

He said, “It sounds like money laundering.”

She lifted her face to him, inhaling the smoke rising from her lips. “It is very much like money laundering.”

He looked around the apartment. “Lucrative,” he said.

“You and Mrs. Jones don’t need to send me money. I provide for James very well.”

“Please,” he said.

She shrugged.

“When will James be joining us?” he asked again.

A door opened and the boy approached almost silently across the white carpet. He was classically dressed, as if from pre-war Showa, in belted white trousers and white shoes.

Emmett stood up, undecided as to whether he should offer to shake his son’s hand. He searched for himself in James’s face. James blushed and tried not to smile, just the way Lennie would do, repressing a grin. It was eerie, an improbable constellation of influence. Emmett had never doubted that he had fathered this boy. He thought of him often, his ghost son, loved him instinctively, compulsively. Now here he was, James, tall for his age, well mannered, self-possessed despite the heat that had risen to his face.

Emmett said hello. “Thank you for seeing me.” Then he regretted saying that; the boy was only nine, too young to judge his father.

If a cook had prepared lunch, she wasn’t there now to serve it. Aoi brought the meal on a tray from the kitchen. It was good food, but the soup was cold; it had been left ready to serve some time ago. He realized that he’d seen the cook clamber down the front stoop as he arrived; he’d held the door for her and she had looked at him closely, with a glimmer of malice.

Aoi encouraged James at lunch, “Go ahead. Ask him.”

The boy began to speak in Japanese. Aoi reprimanded him, “In English.” He began again. Did he live in a house in Canada? Did it have a big yard? Is the ocean nearby? Then he asked, “Does my sister look like me?”

Aoi rose and gathered the plates on the tray and took them to the kitchen.

Emmett, glad to be alone with him, said, “No. Except she’s tall like you.”

“Will I ever meet her?”

“Would you like to?”

“My mother refuses to go to Canada.”

“Well, she has work to do here.”

“She says they would never give her permission.”

Emmett wondered what the boy knew. “Who?” he asked tentatively. “Who are they?”

James shrugged, kicked the legs of his chair, and said, “Mr. Smith.”

“Who is Mr. Smith?”

“He said.”

“What?”

“We must not go away.”

“Did he say why?”

James darkened. Emmett thought, Children are so unerringly averse to deception. James looked toward the swinging door leading to the kitchen and said, “I don’t know.”

Aoi returned. “You may leave the table now.” She ran her hand through her boy’s hair and nudged him gently off his chair. “Go, darling.”

James wiped his hands on the back of his white trousers as he stood stubbornly beside his chair.

Aoi straightened. Emmett sensed that she was surprised at this small show of defiance; she had strong discipline over him.

James walked around till he was standing close to Emmett. Emmett lightly put his hand under the boy’s chin. “I’m very happy to see you.”

“Thank you,” James said.

“You’re a good boy. Your mother is lucky.”

James smiled, his pride restored. “If we could go to Canada —”

“That’s enough,” said Aoi firmly.

James blushed and quietly left the room. When he was gone and had closed the door behind him, Emmett turned to Aoi. “Who is Mr. Smith?”

“There are many. You met one last night.”

“Mr. Smith is CIA.”

Aoi didn’t respond. She lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke, and looked at him. He was beginning to see just how far Gembey and External’s Security branch would go in their cooperation with US security interests. He’d been sent here to meet Mr. Smith.

“It’s dangerous, isn’t it?” he asked. “Money laundering for the CIA.”

She shook her head. “No, no,” she said mildly. “It’s how the government works.”

 

Chapter Thirteen

Lennie was peering up at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life. He was aware of Clark Haywood of Trade and Commerce studying this airport reunion. Haywood had been nervously friendly for the last five days, making a lot of small talk. Now he shook Emmett’s hand with great friendliness, “Nice work, Emmett. Glad to have you on board,” tipping his hat to Suzanne and stumbling over Lennie in his haste to get away. If Emmett knew more than Haywood did about the money for the Kobe Steel Works deal, Haywood wanted to keep it that way.

Emmett stood in his wrinkled coat with his briefcase at his feet. Dr. Kimura had driven Suzanne and Lenore here to collect him. Suzanne, Lenore, and Kimura now stood to receive what had been sent off at the other end by Aoi, James, and Mr. Smith. Emmett had been awake for most of the past seventy-two hours. He imagined these people as six clay figures he’d take to his tomb. Suzanne laughed nervously. “Emmett? Hello?”

He explained that he hadn’t been able to sleep, that he was half-crazed by the din of flying in the North Star. He bent to kiss Lenore and had the disconcerting experience of coming inches from her impersonal grey eyes.

“Where is my brother?” she asked.

“With his mother, in Japan.”

“Will he come?”

“Maybe.”

“When?”

“Sometime, someday.”

Lennie slid her hand into his. It was like being given a white dove. Her cool, impossibly soft skin. She wanted to know, “Did he ask about me?”

“Yes.”

“He wants to come, doesn’t he.”

“Yes.”

“So,” Lennie persisted, “why didn’t he?”

“He has to go to school.”

“He can go to school here.”

They were walking. Lennie tried to swing his hand and he told her to stop it. Then he apologized. “I’m tired, Lennie.”

Lenore was wearing a wide skirt with a crinoline that fell below her knees and she looked gawky and frumpish. She self-consciously collected the fabric and swung it like a country dancer. He felt the lingering presence of his son. As if he’d had a love affair while he was away. Suzanne at his side dropped back to walk with Kimura, and Lenore skipped awkwardly ahead so Emmett was walking alone.

In Kobe, Mr. Smith had arrived at Aoi’s apartment and insisted on driving him to the train station. Emmett had his suitcase with him when he went to see James once more before leaving the country. During this visit, again Aoi had left him alone with James for a few minutes.

The boy delighted him with his refinement, his perfect face lifted trustingly. They talked about baseball. James knew all about the New York Yankees. He’d run out of the room and returned with his baseball glove and softball. Emmett was looking at his watch, calculating how he could squeeze in some time to play catch with his son, when Mr. Smith walked in.

He didn’t knock, but he didn’t enter like one who was coming home either. There was no evidence that he lived here. Aoi rushed in from the kitchen at the sound of his voice. Her nervousness, the entry without knocking, all made Emmett realize that Aoi had no real ownership of this place, and he pulled the boy to himself.

“Well, friendly Canadian, all packed?”

“Hello, Jim.”

Jim clicked his heels, “Came to give you a lift to the station.”

“That’s all right. No need.”

“Nonsense.” Jim picked up Emmett’s suitcase. He gave one of his winking smiles at James and asked him, “Want to come?”

James said that he would like to. He spoke formally to Jim, Mr. Smith, but Emmett couldn’t detect any fear.

“Right! Tell your mother, she looks fine, or we’ll be waiting an hour while she changes her clothes.”

Aoi didn’t banter but calmly took her handbag and put on lipstick, saying to James, “We will ask Mr. Smith to drop us at the market on the way back.”

Jim drove to the station, and all three of them accompanied Emmett inside. Jim steered him ahead of Aoi and James. “Consider my proposal?” he asked.

“Yes. And no thank you.”

“Going to stay on the farm, are you?” Jim said.

“I’ve got a family to support.”

“Pays well. Better’n what you’re getting now. By a long shot.”

“I’m doing all right.”

Jim shook his head in good-natured disappointment. “You don’t understand.” He stopped, and Emmett had to stop too. Jim told Aoi, “Go away for a while, will you?” The boy hesitated. Jim winked at him. “Get your mother to buy you an ice cream. Go on. There’s still time to say goodbye.” Aoi gave Emmett a solemn look and ushered the boy away. Jim said, “You send Aoi what? A couple hundred bucks a month? Back home, you have a wife who’s been — compromised. That’s tough, puts you in a vulnerable position.”

Emmett expressed nothing; nothing in his body revealed that he’d heard the slur against his wife.

Jim, as if setting up a joke, resumed, “Hey, Emmett, what’s the difference between a prophet and a scribe?” Emmett didn’t answer. Jim said, “The prophet isn’t just in the game. The prophet is the game. The prophet doesn’t describe things. He sees things before they happen. Maybe — maybe the prophet makes things happen. Now, the scribe, he just copies, he just duplicates what the prophet sees. That stuff you said last night? Your take on Hanoi and the Russians? I don’t know how you come to know that, but —”

Emmett interrupted him, “I.F. Stone’s Weekly.”

“What?”

“The newspaper. I.F. Stone’s Weekly. I subscribe.”

“Oh. The commie rag.” Jim laughed. “Scribe.”

“I don’t pretend otherwise.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you pretend to be, you timid little shit,” Jim said lightly. “Chugi. Virtue of the husband drone. But you work for us, understand? You think your two hundred a month sends your son to private school? You think a bastard son of a gaijin will last long without a hell of a lot of money backing him? I’m his father. The American government is his father.”

Emmett winced at Jim’s hyperbole and asked, “What do you want?”

“Why do you think we let you into the Caribbean when you were barely dry from an investigation into your loyalty? You scuttled around Cuba like a dumbass tourist. Now, it’s time for you to do some real work. Your government is going to do trade with Cuba. You’re going to keep us informed. Make copies for us. Duplicate.”

“Who am I keeping informed?” But he knew, it was the CIA. External had set him up in Japan to meet Jim Smith, and now Jim was requiring him to turn around and spy on Canada, to report to the Americans on Canada’s trade with Cuba. He almost felt satisfaction that Gembey, too, was being played. The CIA had requested that Gembey first send him to Cuba so soon after the investigation in ’53, to test him in the field. Their suspicion that he was a spy had led them now to require him to actually become one. The farcical reiterations in his life.

“Photographs, pictures, you know, airports, railways, that kind of thing. Union lists, who’s in jail, who’s not. What kind of cigars does Castro smoke, who he’s fucking.”

“I said I have to know who I’m talking to.”

“Me. You’re talking to me. And if you fuck up” — he nodded toward Aoi and James with his ice cream cone — “she goes to jail for doing business with the Yakuza, and the little prince becomes a pauper.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Very tough on young James. Tough on your whole family.”

Emmett found it hard to speak. But he said, “Leave my family alone.”

“You work for us now,” said Jim Smith. He took Emmett’s elbow and guided him to the booth, collected his ticket, and handed it to him.

“Be a hero. Or you and your family can become another casualty in the war against communism. Along with Aoi there, and young James.”

Emmett saw Clark Haywood seated, waiting for the train. Haywood saw him too and pretended to be reading the train schedule, keeping his nose clean.

They were rejoined by Aoi, with James, who suddenly slipped his sticky hand into Emmett’s and held it until Emmett had to board. He kissed James’s cheek, his fine thin face, and said goodbye, James looking at him trustingly, saying, “I will come?”

“You will come.”

Aoi said goodbye to him, calmly meeting his eyes; he guessed that she knew that Jim Smith was bullying him, and he had the impression that she considered this a normal condition.

On the train, Emmett was seated across from Clark Haywood. Haywood glanced out the window to where Aoi and James stood watching. “Family connection,” Emmett said.

Haywood, searching for something pleasant, said, “Beautiful woman.” Then hurriedly put The Japan Times between them.

Now, in Canada, in the Ottawa airport, Lenore turned around and was striding backward, taking big backward steps. “I’m glad you came home, Dad,” she said. “Even if you didn’t bring me my brother.”

He caught up to her and they walked together to claim his suitcase, his hand on her neck, stroking her silky hair.

Emmett was too tired to protest when Kimura put his luggage in the trunk of his car and announced that they would go directly to the gallery so Emmett could see his wife’s new work. “You missed the opening,” Kimura said, “when your wife was beautiful and alone. You’d better make up for it or you will lose her.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Suzanne, flattered. “Are you too tired, Emmett?” She sounded hopeful. “You want to see it?” she asked. He could only say yes.

 

Entering the gallery, Emmett was confused at first by the photographs of flowers, sunsets, and puppies adorning the walls. But Suzanne led the way to another room, and he saw what could only be hers. Lenore leaned against the wall near the entrance and slowly slumped till she was sitting on the floor, her legs stretched straight and covered by the unwieldy skirt, mistrustfully regarding her mother’s “art.”

The faces masked by a hat, the distance and restraint of the poses, the depersonalized actions of the subject, the bizarre makeup and the artifice of her treatment in developing the film, none of this did anything to disguise the fact that they were all photographs of John Norfield.

Emmett took his time in the silent room, making the rounds, Suzanne watching him, waiting, and when he came around full circle and stood before her, she was trembling. “Do you like them?” she asked. He could hear Lenore rustle her crinoline. He nodded yes. Suzanne seized on him, “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Yes, they’re good.”

She looked into one eye, then the other, as if she couldn’t reconcile each view of him. “I want you to like them.”

“Well. I do.” He felt the pounding from the airplane against his skull. Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears. “Come on,” he said and put his arm around her, “home.”