THE LETTER ARRIVED on a Tuesday morning. It was marked Private in a female hand.
P.O. Box 343
Owens Valley Reception Center
Manzanar, California
Dear Jimmy,
I never thought I’d end up here. Could you come visit me please? I have something to tell you, something I should have told you before. I promise it won’t be a waste of time.
Yours faithfully,
Hanako Yukuri
Just what I need, Nessheim thought wearily, for he had his own plans now. He felt in his trouser pocket for the Rossbach driver’s licence, which was always with him. It was his ticket out of a life that hadn’t given him the answers. And now here was Hanako raising questions.
His return to LA had been a close-run thing. After 7 December, prisoners were not a priority for the authorities at Pearl Harbor. Over 2,000 military personnel had been killed (Nessheim had seen half of them die when he witnessed the bombing of the USS Arizona) and the survivors’ sense of shock had turned to anger.
There had been no sign of Shivers, and Nessheim was in no position to demand to see the SAC. On the 11th news ran through the stockade cells that Hitler had declared war on America, and an hour later he’d been suddenly yanked out of his cell by two military policemen, taken in an outboard-powered dinghy across the wreck-festooned loch to the back end of Ford Island and put on a requisitioned Pan Am Clipper, which had taken off five minutes later. Blackout blinds had been fitted over the porthole-shaped windows of the airplane; as the sun went down the attendants took them off and Nessheim saw that they were flying without lights. But no one told him where he was going and he was kept handcuffed throughout the long flight; when he needed the bathroom he was taken under guard, even though he could barely hobble there.
It was only when he had seen the Golden Gate Bridge that he knew they’d returned to San Francisco. At Treasure Island he’d been escorted out first by a trio of MPs carrying carbines. He wondered how long he was going to remain a prisoner, and what he would be charged with. He was confident he could establish his true identity, less sure that he could prove he was on a legitimate mission on Kalaupapa. It was critical that Guttman survive his pneumonia, and he tried not think what would happen if the man didn’t; he knew traitors were usually shot.
The terminal building was crowded with military personnel, looking dazed that their uniforms were suddenly for real. They stared as his escorts cleared a path for the wobbly Nessheim, then led him down a corridor of Pan Am offices. These rooms had also been requisitioned, and the MPs decided he was dangerous enough to warrant the General Manager’s suite. It had a stunning view of the Bay, but the contrast with his cell’s view of the watery graveyard in Hawaii was almost too much to bear. He looked away, and it was then that one of the MPs slapped him.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked in surprise.
‘Pearl Harbor,’ the soldier said without batting an eye.
Nessheim wanted to tell him that it was deserved, but for a different reason. Nessheim wasn’t a spy; he was a failure.
He asked mildly, ‘So what happens next – you hit me again?’ And the soldier was clenching his fist when the door opened.
‘That’s enough,’ said a calm voice.
The soldier said crossly, ‘Our orders were to bring the prisoner to an office, and then—’
‘Await further orders,’ the man said smoothly. ‘Your first one is to take those handcuffs off.’
The soldier hesitated, then reluctantly unlocked the cuffs. At last Nessheim turned around.
‘Stephenson?’ The Canadian stood in front of him, dressed in a brown wool suit and grey fedora.
‘You two know each other?’ the soldier asked suspiciously. He looked at Stephenson. ‘I’d better see those orders.’
‘Be my guest.’ Stephenson handed over an envelope.
As the soldier read the letter inside, his eyes widened. He looked at Stephenson and saluted smartly. ‘Sir!’
‘That’ll do,’ said Stephenson. ‘You can leave us now.’
When the sailors had gone Nessheim let out a soft whistle. ‘I’m impressed. Who signed the letter – the Pope?’
Stephenson gave a hint of a smile. ‘No. Just the President.’
He had come back to LA with Stephenson on a Main train full of soldiers. They eyed the gimpy Nessheim admiringly, as if he must be one of the first casualties of the war. In a way he supposed he was.
He and Stephenson had sat up in the smoker, though neither smoked, drinking rye and ginger while Nessheim related what had happened to him in Kalaupapa and then at Pearl Harbor.
Stephenson shook his head in wonder. ‘I knew we were sending you into the frying pan, but I didn’t think you’d get burnt.’
At Union Station they walked slowly through a terminal teeming with panicky civilians talking about the prospects of a Jap invasion. Stephenson had put Nessheim in a taxi and paid the fare home after Nessheim had remembered that his wallet was still in a locker on Ford Island.
At first – which meant in the days before Christmas – the entire city had seemed on war alert, recoiling from Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’. Strict blackout regulations were imposed, rationing was introduced, and the Japanese population began to be rounded up. The flame-fanning headlines of the popular press meant that everyone knew what to expect – the worst.
But gradually things calmed down, perhaps because the actions of the war were once again so far away – the Japanese were advancing unimpeded throughout the Far East, while the Germans seem stalled in the Soviet hinterland and had been pushed back from Kursk. There was nothing phoney about this war, but by January there was at least a sense of lull, as America focused on preparing for the part it knew it was going to play. Like an innocent beast wounded for the first time, but now recovering, the United States was gathering strength for worldwide war. Full power had been applied to its internal engine, and the capacities of its existing factories were being maximised, while hundreds of new ones were going up. All to produce enough guns and tanks and ships and planes for a fight which no one thought would be over soon.
At the Bureau office Hood lost interest in Communists in Hollywood, preoccupied instead with rounding up Japanese-Americans, while Cohan was deputed to tour other Western field offices to help them do the same. He left, but not before reminding Nessheim of his promise to show Mrs Cohan around the AMP studio.
There the biopic of Hoover had been deferred indefin-itely, while a roster of war movies were rushed into production, boosting the studio’s fortunes but leaving Nessheim with virtually nothing to do. He’d had one brief phone conversation with Guttman in February after Guttman had come out of the hospital, but Guttman didn’t sound a hundred per cent, and Nessheim had not wanted to keep him long.
Nessheim’s social life was negligible, confined to the occasional drink with Teitz. He almost never saw Lolly, for she was no longer working in the Ink Well and had landed a succession of small parts in the studio’s flurry of new productions. Recently she had been cast in her first leading role, in one of the new features the Count was directing now that the Hoover film had been put on ice. As a mark of her move up she had been given a new name – Lolly Baker was now Lois Merola.
But it was Elizaveta Mukasei he wondered most about. The Russians were officially allies now, which coincided with her disappearance from his life. His phone calls went unreturned, a note he sent got no reply. Perhaps she now regretted her overtures – if not the flirtatious ones of their midnight swim, then her suggestion of a swap: information about her husband’s activities in return for citizenship. It would have been hard to make the deal in any case – the spies the Bureau was preoccupied with were either Japanese or German. But Elizaveta could relax, he thought. If Mikhail did go back, America was not going to deport his wife when her country was on the same side.
He had returned hoping to find answers to explain his botched mission in Hawaii. If he could not undo the disastrous consequences, he could at least unearth their causes. So many questions remained unanswered. He’d phoned Dickerson, the LAPD detective, enquiring about Mrs Oka’s case and the murder of Jimmy Lapides in the barber shop. Dickerson made it clear he had bigger fish to fry, and now claimed Mrs Oka’s murder was a botched burglary after all. According to the detective, Lapides’s slit throat was a case of ‘the wrong guy being in the wrong place at the wrong time’.
The detective went on, ‘I heard you were down in San Pedro when they found that fisherman’s wife. Check with the cops down there if you want, but they haven’t got anywhere either.’
He called the Cleveland Field Office the next day from the studio. He got through to the SAC easily enough by claiming to call on Hood’s behalf. He was just double-checking an earlier query, he said, giving Mo Dubin’s name and mentioning an associate named Ike.
Sure, said the SAC, and he was happy to explain Ike Winters was a long-time gambling boss with three convictions in Ohio alone. Dubin was even better known to the Cleveland office and was a more sinister character who had started as a small-time Shaker Heights bootlegger, then gradually moved up in life by rubbing out his immediate competitors.
So why had Cohan claimed Ike and Dubin were clean? He couldn’t have called the Cleveland office, as he said he had. There was only one explanation (and the only one for his ritzy house in Beverly Hills). He was on the take. Which solved a mini-mystery for Nessheim, not that he had an ounce of proof.
So now as March was ending, Nessheim looked down at Hanako’s letter again, strongly tempted to put it in a drawer and forget about it. He’d be in the Forces soon enough, where he could make a new life for himself and forget about the recent past.
But then he thought about Billy Osaka, wondering again what was the real story behind his disappearance. Nobody knew, thought Nessheim. Except maybe Hanako.