Allegiance (23 page)

“I never grew as much as I did that year,” Biddle continues. “Holmes opened my mind and let the platitudes and prejudices of Harvard fall out. I don't think we have his equal on the Court now, but it's a solid group. Black,
of course. Owen Roberts, Bill Douglas. And Felix Frankfurter. I had a very nice letter from Frankfurter when I was appointed Attorney General. ‘In the words of Holmes,' he wrote, ‘I bet on you.' ”

I try to remember Frankfurter saying a kind word about Biddle. I fail. “He's always been very solicitous with me,” I say.

“Felix collects people,” Biddle says. “Generally he shows good taste. I invited him to speak at the Fly Club alumni dinner in '33, you know. Not a success, I'm afraid. Many of the members declined to attend. Sam Skinner didn't speak to me for years.” His voice trails off, and he is silent for a moment; then he looks around the room as though recalling himself to the present. “So, you're interested in the Department. I think it can be arranged. You've seen what we do. A bit different from the work of the Court. The certificate the President signs to appoint a Justice attests to his uprightness, wisdom, and learning. For the Attorney General it lists patriotism, integrity, and ability. It makes for an easy joke about the qualities each one lacks, but there's truth to it as well. We represent the United States. Not a party or a faction, but the country. Roosevelt is not a superman, but he has given the people a vision of what their government could be, that it could be theirs, the government and the country alike.

“I decided as a young man that I would be one of the governing class, not just a gentleman of cultivated taste. And that's who I want with me. Not society, but those who want to serve. Do you understand me?”

I nod assent. It is what Judge Skinner said to me, so long ago. He and Biddle have different views on governance, of course, but it is interesting to see they share this much.

“Well, then,” says Biddle. He follows my gaze to a photograph on the wall. A small boy with a tag on his jacket leans out the window of a train, holding an American flag. “Terribly sad,” Biddle says. It is a Japanese boy. “James Rowe gave me that. The head of the Alien Enemy Control Unit. You know, the Japs actually have a much stronger sense of duty than we do. Of the obligations of citizenship.”

It is a perfect opening. “Do you need anyone else there? I'm quite familiar with the cases.”

“Oh, of course,” says Biddle. “Indeed we do. Rowe's actually on his way out. His number came up. We could use your understanding of the Supreme Court's thinking. And you can help us work with the War Department. It's been an area of some difficulty for us.” He presses the intercom on his desk and a secretary appears. “Our friend the Captain is still with Rowe,” Biddle says. “Send him to my office.” He turns back to me. “There's been rather a tug-of-war between the departments, but it's important that we stay in close communication. I believe you'd have an advantage in the job.”

We wait. Biddle smiles at me; I look at the photograph on the wall. Footsteps come down the corridor and pause, then the door swings open.

“Hiya, Swell,” says John Hall. I look at him in silence.

“Well,” says Biddle. “I expect you have some catching up to do.”

• • • • 

“I ought to punch you in the nose,” I say when we are alone together.

“What for?” Hall's bland good looks express puzzlement easily.

“And again for not knowing why,” I say. “Suzanne. Did she mean that little to you?”

“Suzanne?”

“Did you tell her you'd seen your death? Pretend you were going into combat? Let me know when the planes hit the Pentagon. When your desk gets shot down.”

“No, Swell, you've got it all wrong.” Hall raises his hands as if in surrender. “That wasn't me. It was a buddy of mine. He said it to all the girls, but he really was shipping out. He's dead now, if it makes you feel better. The Japs got him at Guadalcanal.”

“Jesus,” I say. “Of course not.” There is risk and its rewards, the body that held hers now uniting itself with earth, or bobbing slowly homeward on Pacific swells.

“I didn't know you were still an item. Honest. I would have . . . said something. Hell, I don't know. But she didn't talk much about you. Really, are you still seeing her?”

The answer is no. We have not spoken since that last phone conversation,
and when my thoughts stray to her I push them away as best I can. I have a job to do; I cannot spare the energy to suffer. Still, the question is an insult. I say nothing.

“Maybe that's a sore spot,” says Hall. “Forget I asked. Look, we've got to work together.” He puts out his hand. “Bygones?”

I let it hang there. “No one calls me Swell.”

Hall smiles. “I do.”

“You're going to stop. It's Cash.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember that one. Very reliable, but doesn't draw much interest.” He smiles more broadly, attempting to induce a matching response.

I give him none. “How's that?” I ask.

“We said it about your squash game,” he says. The smile looks like it is not a part of him, but something affixed to his face with adhesive. “And a little bit the girls.” He extends the hand farther. “Come on, you should hear what I get with John Hall.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alco-hol,” he says. “ ‘John Hall gives me a headache,' that sort of thing. Never heard it? Never mind. Just shake my hand, will ya?”

I look from his thick fingers to his earnest eyes and back again. There was always a sharp edge of rivalry to my childhood friendship with John Hall, and nothing that has happened since has made me think more kindly of him. But he is my best source in the War Department, and I am sure I will need him. I take his hand. “Bygones,” I say.

• • • • 

Biddle walks me out, pointing to murals on the wall. “My brother George did these,” he says. They are triumphalist, like Hoover's, but slightly more abstract. A stylized Holmes rides a white charger against what looks to be a cloud of red tape; religious figures hover approvingly above icons of the law. “I had a bit of trouble getting them approved,” Biddle says. “There was a feeling in some quarters that he'd made Christ look too Jewish.”

In the entry foyer, Biddle bids me farewell. I pause, looking about the Great Hall. I have gone from one set of statues to another, from marble to
aluminum. Here again they are Justice and Law, but there is a difference. The Court's lintel promises equal justice under law, the impartiality of the blind. The Department's statue wears no blindfold, for its members take sides. As Biddle said, they take the side of America, they sue for justice. I say the motto to myself as I leave.
Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur.

I say something else, too. The men behind Gressman's murder may be here. They may be in the War Department; they may be somewhere else altogether. But wherever they are, I am on their trail. I am coming for them. It isn't the weightless ecstasy of that moment when I leapt from the stairs of the Beta house. I am hauling sadness, trailing broken vows. But I am aloft. Black wings beat the air. I am coming, flying to vengeance, flying to war.

• • • • 

At home there are fewer people to notify and no one's permission to seek. “Francis Biddle,” says my father, his voice faint over the phone. He says nothing more. He does not need to; I can fill in the general outlines. Francis shows that even the solid Biddles can lose their heads. He has never been reliable, with his novel-writing and his Bull Moosing; he was clearly deranged by the Depression. There is rot in that family, and artistic frivolity—do I know that George is now painting impressionist tenements for the WPA?

What need not be said need not be answered, and there is no answer that would satisfy my father anyway. But later, as I say good-bye to Black, I think of another point that he might have been suggesting.

“Been an interesting year,” says Black. “I hope I taught you something.”

“You did, Judge.”

Hazel eyes sparkle. “What?”

“My father once told me that no man is a hero to his valet.”

“And?”

“You taught me it's not true.”

“Shucks,” says Black. “No man who's got a valet is a hero in my book.”

IN SOME WAYS
my job at Main Justice begins just as my clerkship did. They take me to a small room filled with stacks of paper and tell me to get to work. I am in James Rowe's office, sitting at his desk, reading his files. The man himself is en route to a Navy destroyer.

In another way, of course, this job is totally different. I am not here to get experience or a look at the justice system from the inside. I am not here to make friends or connections who can help me further down the road. I am here to find a killer, and I know already that there is no one I can trust.

The main task of the Alien Enemy Control Unit is to defend the evacuation and detention of the Japanese. More legal challenges are making their way towards the Supreme Court.
Hirabayashi
was a victory for the government, but the struggle is by no means over. Rowe's files will give me the background necessary to understand the cases still to come. And, I hope, they will help me figure out who might care about these cases enough to kill for them.

But as I start to work through them, the files puzzle. Rowe's notes are cryptic and incomplete, and arranged in no order I can discern. In places they are spiced with plainly irrelevant materials. The same folder might hold a court filing from the
Hirabayashi
litigation, Rowe's narrative of a meeting with Karl Bendetsen of the War Department, and a report on grain prices in the Midwest.

I try several boxes of files, but it is all more of the same. I find Bendetsen's
name again and again, the chronicles of War and Justice; I find briefs and legal analysis; I find a report on price-fixing in the wheat industry from the 1920s.

I have seen Rowe once, a pale young man sitting at the government's table during the
Hirabayashi
argument. He did not look happy then, but he did not seem completely insane, either, which is how he comes across from the files. Hoping he's left something as a guide to all of this, I put the papers back down on the floor and open the main drawer of my new desk. Like insects fleeing the light, a few pencils roll to the back. They leave behind a smell of wood shavings and a single sheet of paper, Justice Department stationery.

Rowe has written a letter, but it is not addressed to me. It is for Attorney General Biddle, two sentences long.
I hereby resign my position as Special Assistant to the Attorney General. I do not believe that continued representation of the government in this matter is consistent with the interests of Justice.
Rowe's resignation, I think, though the phrasing is odd for a man who was drafted out of his position. But then I notice two things. The letter is undated. It is unsigned, too, but below the space for a signature someone has typed a name. And the name there is not James Rowe. It is Caswell Harrison; it is me.

I blink a few times at the paper in my hand. It could be a practical joke. For all I know, it could be a tradition in the Department. But it gives me an unpleasant feeling, and I am sitting at the desk frowning into space when the door opens and Edward Ennis steps in.

Ennis is my boss, the head of Alien Enemies, a pink-faced thirty-five-year- old with dark, expressive eyes and waves of Brylcreemed hair. There is a thick folder under his arm. “So,” he says. “You're Biddle's fair-haired boy.”

I shrug, getting to my feet.

“Oh, please.” He raises a dismissive hand. “Sit. Now, do you know what you're here for?”

There is something challenging in his tone. I am out of place, I suppose. Inexperienced. And it is true that I would not have this job but for my friendship with Francis Biddle. But I know why I am here. I hold his eyes. “Yes.”

“Good,” he says. “I hope you're settling in. These cases won't be won or lost on the law. I need you to pull together the facts.”

I am already regretting my answer. “The facts?”

“The facts justifying evacuation.” Again there is an edge of hostility in his voice. “The facts that show disloyalty.”

“Right.”

Ennis hefts the folder. “That's your main job. But we've got some months for that. Here's your first assignment.” The folder lands on my desk with a thud. “I want an answer this week.”

• • • • 

Unlike Rowe's, these files explain themselves. They are records for inmates at the Leupp detention center, a prison camp set up on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. It is an isolation center for the incorrigibles among the detainees, the worst of the worst. We send them there from the other camps in trucks with the windows painted black and hold them behind cyclone fences. The 150 military police outnumber their charges by more than two-to-one.