THE CAMP WAS a vast, stark complex of low-roofed barracks, stretching for almost a mile into the grey salt flats. It was Spartan housing, uninsulated, with tar-papered roofs. The landscape was bleak, though in the distance dramatic, snow-capped mountains lined the horizon on three sides, foreshortened in the clear desert air like tantalising colour postcards held just out of reach.
At the front entrance to the compound a sentry swung the gate back as soon as he saw Nessheim’s badge. A twelve-foot fence ringed with triple strands of barbed wire lined the simple vast rectangle, studded at intervals by high watchtowers, which were manned by soldiers carrying vintage Springfield rifles from the Great War. Nessheim parked his car off the main dusty thoroughfare of this newly created ‘town’, between a general store with shuttered windows and a schoolhouse, which had a pretty little bell tower but no bell. Next to that sat the command post, a larger version of the general store. Two MPs stood guard on either side of its front doors.
Inside, Nessheim showed his credentials and was ushered in to the governor, a New Yorker named Kramer. Nessheim explained why he was there, turned down Kramer’s offer of an escort, and drove almost half a mile to Row C, passing monotonously identical tar-papered barracks. It was all a far cry from the Little Tokyo he had known, though since the deportations the LA neighbourhood should have been rechristened Ghost Town.
As he walked towards Hut 11 Hanako appeared in the doorway in a faded calico dress and a scarf to protect her hair from the dust.
‘You came!’ she exclaimed. He couldn’t tell if she was delighted or just surprised.
‘Hanako, why are you here? I thought you’d gone to Chicago with your family.’
‘I did, but then I came back and then internment started.’
Nessheim looked around at the packed dust, the high, wire-topped fence and the bleak hut.
She shrugged. ‘You’ll understand in a minute. Come on in.’
He followed her into a small room that had a pine table and a small sink in one corner. She crossed the room and stopped at a doorway that was screened by an old sheet held up by tacks. Lifting a corner, she gestured Nessheim to come through. He followed her cautiously into a darker room, where only a small shaft of daylight came through the solitary window, illumin-ating a patch of knot-holed plank floor and a few pine slats of the walls. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw that the furniture consisted of a camp bed against the far wall and a stool in one corner, where a man-like figure was sitting. It looked like a tailor’s dummy, but dummies didn’t wave hello.
‘Hey, Jimmy,’ said a quiet voice from the stool. Even subdued, the voice had the happy-go-lucky tone that had always made its owner such a breath of fresh air.
Nessheim moved forwards until he could make out the face.
‘I thought you were dead,’ he said without relief.
‘If I don’t get out of this place, I will be soon enough.’
‘Is the food that bad?’
Billy gave a wan smile. ‘I thought I was the guy who made the jokes.’
He didn’t look good. Bare-chested and barefoot, he wore only a stained pair of khaki trousers. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and there were stray black hairs on his cheeks the size of staples. His hair had been cut, but lopsidedly.
Maybe it was because he had been looking fruitlessly for Billy so long, or maybe it was because of all that had happened since Billy had asked to meet (It’s import-ant), but Nessheim couldn’t think of anything to say.
He looked around and found another little stool in a corner. He hooked it with his foot and drew it out, then sat down. When he let his eyes rise they met Billy’s, which were animated now, as if Nessheim’s arrival had brought him to life.
Nessheim said at last, ‘As I remember, you wanted to see me.’
Billy laughed and Nessheim gave a wry smile. He noticed Hanako had left the room.
‘Like old times, huh?’ said Billy.
No, thought Nessheim. He said, ‘I was sorry about your grandmother.’
The smile on Billy’s face melted. ‘They ever catch who did it?’
‘No,’ said Nessheim. ‘The LAPD’s not too good in Little Tokyo. You know that. They say it must have been a burglar.’
Billy shook his head.
‘So where did you go anyway?’ asked Nessheim casually. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’
‘I needed a change of scene. I worked with my cousin in Oregon during the salmon run; I picked grapes for a bit in Napa; and I saw the High Sierra at last. Don’t tell Hanako,’ he added with a wink.
Nessheim nodded slowly. ‘That’s funny, I’ve been travelling too.’
‘Anywhere nice?’ asked Billy. They could have been swapping holiday stories over a beer.
‘Hawaii,’ said Nessheim, and Billy blinked. ‘Unfortunately I was on the job. I saw your cousin Akiro while I was there. He sent his best.’
Billy’s eyes didn’t waver, but one of his hands was now clenched. If they’d been playing five-card stud, Nessheim would have doubled down.
‘How’s he been keeping?’ Billy managed to say.
‘So-so. He lost his wife, you know.’
‘I didn’t.’ The surprise seemed genuine.
‘Yeah, someone mistook her for a tuna in the San Pedro cannery. She bled to death.’
Billy paled.
‘Still, he’s doing okay, I think. They say time heals all wounds, but I reckon money medicine works just as well. And I heard in Hawaii that Akiro’s had a big dose of it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Billy, coolly neutral. ‘But Akiro has always been a big spender.’
‘Well, he’s got something to spend now.’ Nessheim waited a moment, then asked as if out of the blue, ‘Did you pay him?’
‘For what?’ Billy looked suddenly alert. ‘I might have slipped him the odd couple of bucks now and then. Akiro was always short.’
‘Your friend Ike says the same of you.’
Billy whistled air through pursed lips. ‘You get around, Jimmy.’
‘Akiro was on a different scale altogether. He’s come into something like twenty-five grand.’
‘How the hell do you know?’ Billy was sitting up now.
‘I did the groundwork. Ask Hanako. I even met her boss Mr Satake. Did Hanako siphon off the money? You know, twenty-five grand from the Russians?’
‘You’d better ask her. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The Russians must have thought they were smart using a Japanese bank – excuse me, a Japanese-American bank.’
‘Is there a difference?’ asked Billy with a bitterness Nessheim had never heard in him before. Billy gestured to the grim room they sat in and with a wider sweep of his hand to the camp itself. Nessheim could see his point.
‘Anyhow,’ Nessheim continued, ‘it was pretty dumb of them. If the Russians were trying to hide the transfer they couldn’t really complain when Hanako lifted half of it.’
‘You’ve learned a lot of things,’ said Billy.
‘Not that much really. I was hoping to get some more answers from you.’
‘Sure,’ said Billy, but his eyes were flitting to the door.
Nessheim sat back, making sure his gun hung loose. ‘When did Akiro tell you about the plan to attack Pearl Harbor?’
Billy pursed his lips, then rocked his head back and forth. ‘Take it easy on me, Jimmy,’ he said. He wouldn’t look Nessheim in the eye.
‘Is that what you were going tell me?’
Billy nodded reluctantly.
‘So why the hell didn’t you?’ Nessheim was almost shouting. He heard Hanako stir in the next room and lowered his voice. ‘All those guys who died. I saw it, Billy. It wasn’t nice.’
‘They were trying to kill me. They still are. They thought I was going to talk.’
‘To me?’
A faint hint of a nod.
Billy was trying to pull himself together.
He said, ‘Listen, I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but first you have to get me out of here.’
Nessheim was still picturing the sunken USS Arizona. ‘Then play ball, Billy. Who is trying to kill you? I know it’s not Ike any more. Is it the nationalists? Or the Tokyo Club? Or are they the same thing? I need to know.’
‘If I tell you now there won’t be any reason for you to pull strings. Don’t bullshit me, Jimmy. I know how it works.’
Billy hadn’t lost his cunning. It sat beneath his surface razzmatazz like tracks under a bouncy train.
Nessheim stood up. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll come back in the morning.’
‘Hey Jimmy,’ Billy said, shivering slightly. ‘Any chance you could loan me your gun? Just for the night.’
Nessheim shook his head. ‘Sorry.’
Billy hugged himself. ‘And I’m sorry, too, that I didn’t tell you. But I was scared.’
There was no sign of Hanako when Nessheim left. He drove down the dusty avenue and pulled up at the command post again. Inside, his conversation with Kramer proved unsatisfactorily short; in the base commander Nessheim had run into a classic bureaucrat who was uninterested in individual situations. Kramer wasn’t going to be swayed by the fact that people in the camp – nationalists? gangsters? – might want to harm Billy Osaka. Kramer’s concern was with authorisation, and he made it clear that here Nessheim fell short.
Lone Pine was an arid, unattractive little town with one hotel on its main street. It was two storeys with a long railed balcony on its upper floor, but had seen better days. He paid for a room, then went and asked for a Western Union office, which turned out to double as the Southern Pacific railway depot, a little north-east of town.
It was only three o’clock, but it would be six out east, too late for Guttman to do anything until morning.
Nessheim read in his room for a couple of hours, then ate an early supper of chicken-fried steak with baked beans in the hotel dining room. After supper, he was half-tempted by the saloon, but went up to his room. It had a radio and he listened to news on KSL, a Salt Lake station, about the Russian push against the Germans, and about the Japanese advance in the Philippines. There was a report, too, of the American soldiers now in Great Britain – a crackly voice said that it was just fine over there and the boys were getting used to fish and chips. Then KSL played religious music until he fell asleep. When he woke halfway through the night it was to a blanket of static.
There were no messages downstairs when he checked out after a breakfast of grits and bacon, and his frustration grew as he sped towards the camp – the MP barely had time to open the gate as he drove in. He parked and jumped out of his car, half-running up the steps into the headquarters, passing a typist who did a double take when he walked straight into the governor’s office.
Kramer was at the window, looking out at the dusty parade ground where the internees gathered for announcements and the distribution of parcels.
‘Have you had a telegram from D.C.?’ Nessheim asked immediately.
Kramer didn’t turn around.
‘I have,’ he said.
‘Did it authorise Osaka’s release?’ he demanded.
‘It did.’
‘Can I see the internee, please?’
He didn’t care if Kramer wanted to sulk. He just wanted to get Osaka out of there. He’d do what he could for Hanako once he got back to LA.
Kramer went and stood behind his desk. He sighed and bowed his head.
‘You may not want to.’
Kramer looked at Nessheim for the first time. There was something awful in his eyes, something beseeching. It spooked Nessheim.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Come with me and I’ll show you.’
There was no sign of Hanako at Hut 11. The tiny table in the front room still held their dishes from last night’s supper. There was an MP in the next room, visible when the sheet hanging in the doorway ruffled in the slight breeze. He looked relieved when they joined him and after entering the room Nessheim saw why.
Billy was lying on his back on the floor, both his arms extended. He wore the same trousers but had put on a shirt; he was still barefoot. He looked smaller and almost frail, stretched out on the plank floor like an overgrown kid. But there was a knife in his chest, which had a long oval handle and was stuck in to a hilt that was covered in phoney little jewels. It looked like a stage prop from a production of The Arabian Nights, but it had done its job.
‘Who killed him?’ Nessheim demanded. He noticed there was very little blood.
Kramer didn’t reply. The MP shrugged, then said, ‘There’re disagreements among the Japs. Sometimes the arguments get out of hand. Somebody gets mad …’
‘Bullshit. Look at him – he hasn’t been in a fight.’
The MP looked uncomfortable.
Kramer said from the window, ‘The soldier’s right, Agent Nessheim. Osaka wasn’t very popular among the Butoki-Kai. And they seem to be in charge.’
The reactionary nationalists.
‘Seem to be? Don’t you know?’
Kramer shrugged.
‘Where was Hanako Yukuri when this happened?’ Nessheim asked angrily.
The MP said, ‘The women gather once a week to sort out any problems with the food supply. Last night was meeting night. When Yukuri came back she found him, just like this.’
‘I want this looked into right away. Fingerprints and people interviewed. Somebody must have heard something.’
Kramer looked at him glumly. Nessheim could see he was worried about what had happened under his watch, and he wouldn’t want another telegram from Washington.
Kramer said, ‘There’s one other thing you should know.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Somebody cut the fence last night. At the outer perim-eter. We’ve done a roll call and everyone’s accounted for. It looks like they were cutting their way in, not out.’