28

Newcastle, California * September 19, 1943

Agent Bonner is certain of it now: He is being watched. Even alone in his room, he feels the prickle of eyes on him. During his first night in the boardinghouse, he thought he heard the sound of creaking outside his door. But now, on Sunday—his fourth night as a guest—he’s sure he isn’t imagining things. He’s heard the creaking all too often and all too regularly.

Yet again he hears a soft rustling, the groan of a floorboard. He suspects it is his hostess, spying on him. Or, at the very least, straining to listen to his every cough and twitch. He can’t imagine why she would spy on him, or what she wants, and yet he is sure she is.

Bonner has been restless all weekend, and Rosalind’s behavior put him further on edge. Over dinner, he tested her by letting Sheriff Whitcomb’s news about the punctured fuel line “slip,” aiming to gauge her reaction. He watched her face closely and glimpsed surprise, alarm, and . . . something else he couldn’t make out.

“Do you have any evidence to suggest who might’ve done such a thing?” she asked.

Bonner insinuated that he wasn’t at liberty to say, and watched as she began nervously fingering the collar of her dress. Did Rosalind have an inkling who the culprit might be? Was she protecting someone? Or was she simply unsettled to think one of her neighbors could do such a thing? No one relished the idea of sharing her hometown with a murderer.

She didn’t ask anything further and they finished the meal in silence. Afterward, Rosalind dutifully cleared the dishes. Bonner retired to his room. Outside his window the light was slowly draining from the sky.

Now Bonner reclines on top of the neatly made bed with a pillow stuffed behind his neck, flipping through his notebook, rereading details about the case he has jotted down. Late Friday afternoon, the airplane mechanic they called in from Sacramento verified the business about the fuel line. Several questions remain: How was it cut? With what? And by whom?

Bonner turns his attention to the other evidence in the case, specifically the bodies of the men who perished in the crash. Kenichi Yamada’s body was the less burned of the two and was positively identified by several people on the day of the crash. That much, at least, is straightforward. But even so, some curious details have emerged. Kenichi’s body showed signs of faint bruising, and bruising suggests healing, even if the healing was brief. This in turn indicates Kenichi acquired his wounds—or some of them, at least—before the plane crash.

Bonner recalls the bruises he spotted on Louis Thorn’s face when he went to his house on the day of the crash. Bonner is no expert, but the freshness of the bruises suggests the two men—Kenichi and Louis—acquired their injuries within the same general time frame. But why would Louis fight an old man? Even if Kenichi and Haruto Yamada had returned to their old property and confronted Louis Thorn and an argument erupted, it was far more likely that Louis would have had it out with Haruto—or “Harry,” as everyone in town called him. How and why would the old man get directly involved in some kind of fistfight? Most troubling was a heavy contusion very near Kenichi’s left temple; it looked as though he either fell down or someone dealt the elderly man a terrible blow to his head.

The other body—Harry’s—was severely burned. This presents another puzzle. Harry’s body suffered terrible fire damage, whereas Kenichi’s body was only singed. They were sitting in separate cockpits, but the cockpits were not so far apart as to account for the unequal distribution of fire damage. If the suicide theory did, in fact, hold true, then it was almost as if Harry had doused himself in gasoline before taking off. Why would someone do that to himself? Then there was the question of Harry’s uniform; while the body itself was charred, the uniform he was wearing was mostly singed in the manner that Kenichi’s body was singed. The clothing should not have survived as well as it did.

Added to all of this is the fact that one of the two men had to have been well enough in mind and body to pilot the biplane’s takeoff—airplanes didn’t do that by themselves. All signs suggested that Harry Yamada had plotted a bizarre, pointless suicide, but a suicide nonetheless. And yet, Bonner can’t stop thinking about the bruises on Louis Thorn’s face or about Thorn’s cagey reactions and transparent lies.

None of it makes any sense.

As Bonner flips through his notes, he hears the now-familiar creaking just outside his door. He freezes and suppresses his breath, listening. He feels his pulse quickening. Sure enough, the creaking comes again, and he is acutely aware of someone standing in the hall. The sound moves closer, and closer still. Is Rosalind thinking of opening the door this time? Bonner can hear her soft footfalls nervously shuffling this way and that, and swears he hears the meekest rattle of the doorknob moving under her hand. But ultimately the doorknob stops, and Bonner hears the soft groan of the floorboards as she takes one step away from the door. She has changed her mind.

Still holding his breath, Bonner finds he is oddly sorry to hear her go.

All at once, he leaps up, crosses the room, and reaches for the doorknob, yanking the door open. Just as he suspected, Rosalind stands only inches away from the doorway. She blinks in the abrupt light, startled and trapped.

“What do you want?” he asks gently.

To his surprise, she doesn’t budge from where she stands. She only shakes her head. Her wide, surprised eyes never leave his. They are full of a strange, exquisite sadness.

He has an urge to touch her, to put his hands on her shoulders. It is an impulse of tenderness and reassurance, similar to the urge he had on that first day, when she showed him to his room and lingered as though she wanted something from him—some kind of comfort or kindness, or even simple attention. Now Bonner begins to reach toward her but he stops short when he notices she is dressed for bed: A white nightgown hangs on her body, and her shoulders are bare. Bonner shakes himself.

“What do you want?” he demands again, this time more forcefully. His voice surprises him, a near shout. “Why are you watching me?”

Still no answer. She continues to blink. Her lips begin to move as though to speak, but no sound comes out. She is stymied, working to coax the words necessary to explain herself. To Bonner’s discomfort, she begins to tremble, shaking as though he’s abused her by shouting at her, demanding an explanation. She begins backing away, with tiny, mincing steps, down the hallway.

“I’ve heard you lurking outside my room,” Bonner says, a faint hint of exasperation creeping into his voice. “I know you’ve been watching me. But I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you want. Why can’t you tell me? What is it? What do you want?”

Rosalind suddenly halts in her retreat. Her entire body tenses, and she looks at him with a kind of heated glare. Bonner feels a strange sense of shame, as though he has been the one lurking outside her door, and now she is about to chastise him for it.

But everything changes in the space of a second. To Bonner’s surprise, Rosalind lunges toward him. On instinct, Bonner feels his body ready itself for defense . . . until he realizes she is not attacking him. Her mouth is on his. Her skin is warm. He feels the breath moving through her body; within seconds it feels as though it is moving through his body, too.

As Bonner staggers backward, Rosalind staggers with him. Her hands fumble at his pants but never break their resolve. The two of them become a blur of tangled limbs.

---

Afterward, they lie together in Bonner’s creaky double bed. Rosalind’s dark curls rest in the crook of his armpit; her cheek is turned against his chest. Her eyes are open; he can feel her lashes periodically brushing against his skin.

Bonner has no idea what to make of this encounter. Mostly it was tender, but there was something almost anguished and violent in it, too. His thoughts roam the room, racing in a wide circle and returning to him again.

“How long . . .” Rosalind begins to say, but her voice catches in her throat and she gives a quick cough. Her voice has grown low and shy since their encounter. “How long do you think you’ll be in town for this investigation?” she asks.

The question hangs in the air. Under normal circumstances it would be an expected question, the kind of question a woman might ask a man she hopes to keep around—if Bonner could flatter himself to assume that’s what Rosalind wants now: to prolong their time together. But Bonner also senses an unreadable element in the question’s tone and delivery. Once again she seems less interested in Bonner himself and more interested in his investigation and the politics that orbit him.

“It depends,” he says, repeating his earlier response to the same question, “on how much evidence I can turn up for my report.” He pauses. “Someone has to account for the deaths of these two men,” he says, but as soon as the words leave his mouth, his gut tells him he wants this to be true, but it isn’t.

Rosalind stiffens. She sits up with a restless air, holding the covers to her bare chest, looking around for her discarded nightgown. Bonner rolls over to his side and props his head up with one hand, frowning as he watches her. Her sudden agitation has him equally unsettled. He isn’t entirely sure of what he wants—whether he wants her to stay or to go—but he doesn’t like watching her move away from their warm huddle in the bed or watching her slip the thin white nightgown back over her head.

“I don’t see why,” she replies to his assertion that someone had to account for the deaths of the Yamadas, her voice hard—angry, almost. “American boys are dying all over the Pacific; why should we care about a couple of Japs who die here in a plane crash?”

Bonner studies Rosalind’s face, taken aback by her sudden callousness. She returns his stare but does not soften. Her features are hard, her expression chilly. Bonner knows lots of folks feel that way nowadays. He is surprised, however; he didn’t suspect his hostess belonged to their number.

Rosalind, now in her nightgown, stands beside the bed, holding Bonner’s gaze as though deciding how much to tell him.

“If you ask me,” she says, “I’m glad they’re dead. Two less Japs to worry about.”

Her tone suggests she is finished with the conversation. With the ghost of her ugly remark still hanging in the air, she takes one more lingering look at his face—almost as if trying to memorize his features—then turns and leaves.

Agent Bonner stares at the floating white shape of her nightgown as she retreats through the doorway and down the hall. He doesn’t bother to get up and close the door; he knows she will remain in her own bedroom, remote and distant, for the rest of the night. Whatever the interlude was to her, she is done with it—and him—for the time being.

After a minute, he lies back and stares at the ceiling, thinking, still disturbed by her hateful attitude toward the Japanese. She is hardly alone; hers is a popular viewpoint. Two less Japs to worry about. Even Reed probably would agree, even if he might phrase it more diplomatically. Bonner knows Reed has a knack for wrapping such sentiments up in the more respectable garb of patriotism.

It used to do the trick for Bonner—Reed’s patriotic version of events, that is. But somewhere along the line, the rhetoric crumbled for Bonner. If Bonner was pressed to name a particular point that this happened, he would pick the day Jeanne Minami accosted him near the main entrance of the Manzanar Relocation Center.

In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Bonner and Reed and a handful of others led the F.B.I.’s efforts to monitor suspected Japanese spies. When it was discovered that a Japanese spy living in plain sight in Hawaii had sent critical messages through the consulate that led to the surprise attack, their work took on new importance and grew much more demanding. Suddenly, Bonner found himself knocking on countless Japanese-American doors, seizing suspicious contraband, and interviewing countless heads of household.

It was how he crossed paths with the Minami family. Fujio Minami owned a small fleet of fishing boats that he kept in the San Pedro Harbor, and lived with his family in the Japanese community on Terminal Island. When Executive Order 9066 was passed in February 1942, the F.B.I. moved quickly to clear out this community, taking all first-generation Japanese into custody for questioning. Families of these men and other nisei were interned, and most of them were eventually brought to Manzanar.

Fujio Minami presented a problem for the F.B.I.—his boats and fishing shack were outfitted with an extraordinary amount of high-powered shortwave radio equipment. He had also developed a pastime of reading about Japan’s history of shoguns. He was old and his English was awful; he’d lived his whole life only speaking to other Japanese in his tight-knit community. When they asked him whom he wanted to win the war, he said, “Japan.” Bonner wasn’t entirely sure that the old man meant to say he wanted Japan to win. It seemed just as likely that Fujio thought the F.B.I. was asking him to make a prediction based on his knowledge of Japan’s military history, or perhaps was even reporting the winner of wars he’d learned about in school as a boy, as he sometimes added the names of various samurai clans, names that were lost on his interrogators. Either way, he continued to deliver the wrong answer, time and time again. The F.B.I. promptly sent him off to a detention center in North Dakota to be kept under more rigorous watch.

Despite Fujio’s poor English-speaking skills and lack of cultural assimilation, he had three very Americanized adult children: Fred, Jeanne, and Bill Minami. They had been born in America and been granted the citizenship that Fujio had all his life been denied. The oldest, Bill, was outraged to think his father was going to be sent to North Dakota and treated as a war criminal. When they interviewed Fred, asking him to explain away the abundance of radio equipment his father owned—“He’s a fisherman who can’t afford to lose a boat” was all Fred would explain, shaking his head as though disgusted by their inability to grasp the obvious—he made it clear he did not intend to cooperate, and planned to start trouble.

“We’ll protest,” Fred threatened. “This is unconstitutional. You can put us in the camps, but we’ll protest there, too. We have the right to free speech. You can’t just shut us up.”

Fred was unusual. Almost all of the Japanese the F.B.I. interviewed simply answered their questions and sat quietly, hoping for the whole ordeal to be over. Bonner found he had a certain measure of respect for Fred, for his demonstration of incensed behavior that was—ironically enough—most American of all. Bonner’s peers did not see it the same way. Fred was in danger of being added to the growing list of enemies of the state, and shipped off to North Dakota himself.

Bonner took him aside and attempted to befriend the young man, who was only a year or two younger than Bonner himself. Bonner was sympathetic. He explained to Fred how difficult the F.B.I.’s job had become. He told Fred about Tadashi Morimura, the spy in Hawaii, how “normal” he seemed, and how Japanese-Hawaiians had trusted him. They talked about the lives lost in Pearl Harbor, and Fred seemed every bit as grieved over the loss of American life as Bonner. By the end of one long chat in particular, Bonner had even managed to convince Fred to join the Army.

“I’m sure if you enlist, they’ll ease off your father,” Bonner said. “They’re likely to send him home from North Dakota.”

Never mind that “home” was now a camp in the desert surrounded by barbed wire; Fred was eager to see his father back with the rest of his family, healthy and unharmed.

“Are you sure?” Fred asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Bonner replied. After he said it, he wasn’t so sure, but Fred looked gratified, and Bonner was certain Fred Minami would not talk himself into worse trouble with the F.B.I.

Fred signed up, and the last Bonner heard, Fred had been dispatched to Italy. He didn’t give the matter much more thought—until F.B.I. business brought him out to Manzanar one particularly fateful day. That day, as Bonner drove into the camp and got out of his car, a small ceremony was taking place near the main entrance. When he heard a lone bugler playing taps, he understood it was a ceremony to honor a fallen soldier.

He stood a short distance away to watch, curious to see how this long-standing American ritual would be conducted in one of the camps. Five families were lined up, seemingly at attention, while an Army officer delivered a folded flag into each family’s hands. When the Army officer reached the fifth and final family, Bonner experienced a vague flicker of recognition. An older woman and her two adult children. He realized he was looking at what was left of the Minami family.

Before Bonner could react, he was recognized in return. Jeanne Minami, who had been standing quietly at her mother’s side, looked up and spotted Bonner. All at once, her eyes filled with hatred and she began to run in his direction. Bonner was not at all prepared for the onslaught, the blows she rained down upon him as she screamed at him, “You! You’re the one! You lied to him! He enlisted because of you! You told him our father would be released! Now our father isn’t here and my brother is dead!”

A camp guard peeled her off Bonner, dragging her back to where her startled mother still stood, holding the American flag folded into a tidy triangle. But Jeanne wasn’t done. She freed herself from the guard’s grip, knocked the flag from her mother’s hands, and in one final shocking gesture spat on the flag where it lay in the dirt.

A gasp was heard all around. This was not the kind of behavior accepted by the Japanese community, camp or no camp. The guards at Manzanar asked whether Bonner wanted her sent to another facility—to Tule Lake, perhaps—but he said no. He didn’t say so, but part of him felt Jeanne was right: He’d made Fred a false promise. He’d been almost callous in his casual reassurance, and now Fred’s blood was on Bonner’s hands.

After that incident, Jeanne’s situation did not improve. The other evacuees—many of them still, by some miracle of faith, patriotic to America—remembered the image of her spitting on the flag. The older issei and younger nisei alike shunned her, and Jeanne became an outcast. When she was found trying to organize a protest with a small, unpopular group of rabble-rousers in the camp, the white guards, who had also taken deep offense to her outburst, did not hesitate to report her.

The last Bonner heard of her, she had been transferred from Manzanar to Tule Lake.

Bonner decided he’d had enough of fieldwork and put in a request for desk duty, which he knew he would be granted on account of its undesirability. He was still horrified by what had happened in Pearl Harbor, but he didn’t know what to think anymore about Executive Order 9066. He wanted to sit in an office with only the paper version of Japanese evacuees around him. He felt he couldn’t cause any further harm that way, and he’d still be doing his duty to America, to the F.B.I.—and even to Reed, for that matter, who daily tried to force Bonner to agree that the Minami family was troubled and that for all they knew Old Man Minami might really be a spy after all.

Now, as he drifts off to sleep in his room in Rosalind MacFarlane’s boardinghouse, the images in Bonner’s brain begin to merge: Rosalind’s disgusted face as she said Two less Japs to worry about, and Jeanne’s face as she accused Bonner of deceiving and ultimately killing her brother. There is some quality both faces have in common, Bonner realizes—something that goes beyond simple anger. But as the faces continue to merge together, Bonner can’t quite put his finger on the commonality he is sure exists that ties these two women. He is too tired, he decides, and allows himself to slip into the dark void that is, by contrast, a comfort.