Allegiance (32 page)

“Yes.”

“Why'd he do that?”

“I think he wanted an early start.”

Seawell nods once, then grunts and turns his head. For a few moments he gazes out the window. We are climbing higher, skirting the wooded mountains. On my side of the car the ocean shines beyond the flat land, winking through gaps in the trees.

“Are you going to report it stolen?” he asks.

“I gave it to him.”

Seawell starts nodding again. “Of course. Remind me what you're supposed to be such an expert about?”

“The Japanese cases.”

“And which side you're on?”

I look away. Seawell and I have the same view now, thick, green forest of spruce and hemlock. “We're going by San Francisco, right?” I ask.

“Maybe.”

“Can you drop me at the Presidio?” I turn back toward him, but Seawell is still showing me the back of his head.

“Want to try to find your jeep?” he asks.

“There's someone I need to see.”

“Of course.” He turns around now, the anger on his face surprising. “I can drop you wherever you want. Any time, any place.”

“What?”

“I'll drop you,” he says fiercely.

“I don't understand.”

“Yes, you do.”

I shake my head. “I'm sorry, I don't.”

He tries to hold the furious expression, but it slips away. “With a punch,” he says. “Drop you on the floor. Get it?”

“Oh,” I say. “Sure, I get it now. That's a good line. Like in a movie.”

Seawell sighs. “No, it's just . . . you understand. What the hell was that? Supposed to be a fun-filled weekend, then Blaine McGowan shows up with his alligator boots, then you, and then the whole thing blows up in my face. Someone sabotaged my case. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Let it go,” I say. I have given the matter some thought. “Don't appeal.”

“Don't appeal?”

“Look, no one's going to hear about it if it's just Judge Goodman. Appeal it up to the Ninth Circuit and all the California papers will get the story.”

“Main Justice is going to hear about it.” Seawell sounds skeptical, but I can hear a note of hope in his voice.

“They'll hear about it from me. You did everything right. Judge Goodman just went a little nuts. But pushing this case any further will stir up more hostility, make it harder to resettle the loyal ones. Biddle doesn't want that. Believe me, I know what he thinks.” Seawell is nodding more enthusiastically now. “Main Justice has no further interest in this case,” I tell him. “I don't really see why it started, actually. These guys are all certified disloyal, right? What did the army want them for in the first place?”

“It was a mistake,” Seawell says absently. “Administrative snafu. Draft notices weren't supposed to go to Tule Lake at all.”

I am astonished. “And then you prosecuted them for saying no to a mistake?”

He shrugs. “That was a War Department decision. The principle of the thing. But that makes sense about the appeal.”

• • • • 

It is a detour into San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate when Seawell would have skirted the city to the north. But his mood improves as the ride goes on, and by the time we reach the bridge, he is happy to help me. He knows the base, and at his direction the driver takes me straight to the appropriate office. “You'll talk to Biddle,” he says.

I promise I will and leave him with a handshake. Then I turn to the legal offices of the Western Defense Command.

The building is white stucco with a red roof. Three palm trees stand in front. Inside, it is easy to find Karl Bendetsen. He is something of a celebrity on the base, it seems, and it strikes no one as unusual that he is receiving an emissary from Main Justice.

Bendetsen himself is somewhat more surprised. He cocks his head at me as the secretary shows me in. “I wasn't expecting you.”

“I happened to be in the area,” I say, offering a business card. As in the picture in Hoover's file, Bendetsen has his hair slicked back and his khaki tie tucked into a dark green shirt. A shelf behind his chair holds a radio and an empty ashtray.

He glances at my card and puts it in a drawer. “It's a busy afternoon for me.”

“Looks it.” Save for a daily planner, his desk is bare. I take a seat without being asked.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Harrison?”

“Are War Department men in the camps encouraging renunciation?”

Bendetsen looks at me more closely. “What's it to you?”

“I'm writing the briefs for
Korematsu
and
Endo
,” I say. “I'm defending your program. I need to know what you're doing.”

“Ah,” says Bendetsen. He leans back. “The new and improved James Rowe.”

“I suppose so.”

“You didn't know him?”

“No.”

“You're missing out.” Bendetsen's tone turns expansive. Somehow I have put him at ease. “A character. He . . . well, it's almost funny. You should have seen him, that last meeting at Biddle's house. He got so emotional making his case, I thought he was going to cry. On and on about the Constitution this and individualized hearings that.”

I remember it from Rowe's notes. “Why is that funny?”

“Well, the whole time I was sitting there listening to him, you see, I had the order in my briefcase. Biddle had approved it. The President had signed off. Poor old James got himself all worked up for nothing. It had all been decided already.”

“Funny,” I say.

Bendetsen shrugs. “Maybe you had to be there. So, what was it you wanted to know?”

“Are War Department men encouraging renunciation?”

“Of course not.” Now he is frowning. “The War Department is against renunciation.”

“You are?”

“Of course we are. Renunciation is part of Biddle's idea to sort them. Sift out the disloyal, let the rest go. And of course we oppose that.”

“Why?”

“You haven't been in this job long, have you, my friend? If we can sort them now, why not before? Why not when they were still on the coast? Why remove them at all? That's what a court will ask. And what will we say?”

“That there was no time.”

Bendetsen laughs and pushes back from his desk. “How silly of me to forget.” He is doing some sort of Bogart impression, I think, trying to find an appropriate line. Apparently nothing comes. “No, there was time. The first trains went out in May. We had six months if we wanted individualized hearings.”

“Then why didn't we do that?”

He lights a cigarette and holds the pack out to me. I shake my head no. “The military judged it impossible to determine loyalty,” he says, reaching
back for the ashtray. Pinned to the wall is a map of California showing the military exclusion zones. “That was General DeWitt's view.”

“But that's not what Justice argued to the Supreme Court in the curfew case.”

Something in my tone sparks a light in Bendetsen's eyes. Then it dies away. “John Hall is our liaison to Justice,” he says. His face turns vague. “He coordinates the legal strategy. It's not really in my hands.”

“You just set the whole thing up, that's all.”

A great calm is coming over him. This, too, I remember from Rowe's notes. Bendetsen with his reassuring smile, saying everything in the mildest of tones. It means he has identified me as an enemy. “I am a lawyer, Mr. Harrison. I had a client. My client needed a question answered. I told them what the law would allow. I never said this was good policy.”

“But you think it was right.”

“It is not what I joined the government to do.” He sounds innocent, surprised. “We were attacked. We had to respond. I gave a description of the law, of the powers of the President to defend the nation in a time of war. The time pressure was intense. After Pearl Harbor, I didn't sleep for days. But I didn't put anyone on a train. I wrote memos.”

“Men have died because of those memos.”

He is still eerily calm, just as Rowe described him. “Men are dying every day,” he says. “Good men and bad. None of that is my choice. I only described the law.”

I search Bendetsen's face, and it is like looking into the depths of a still sea. Down at the bottom is the Tule Lake stockade, with blood on the walls and broken bats on the floor. Figures move there. The bats rise and fall, the blue chips of wedding china leap. But they are so small, so faint, and in between are miles of water, the thick, invisible layers of the law that cushion our sight. It is so far down through the water, his smile tells me. Who is to say that those things are men at all? Who knows what they feel?

“The President approved it,” Bendetsen says. “Congress approved it.” His voice is soft. The waters move; the figures are obscured. There is only the smooth, impenetrable blue of the law. “If the Supreme Court thinks it's so wrong, they can put a stop to it.”

I nod. I am thinking of clumps of grass in children's hands, dogs trotting after Army trucks. A mother pointing to flags in the guard towers to show her child this is still America. “Well, it's my job to see that they don't.”

“Then I'm sure we have nothing to fear.” He stubs out his cigarette and looks down, dismissing me. I stand.

“ ‘A republic, if you can keep it,' ” I say. “Ever heard that?”

Bendetsen shakes his head. He does not look up. “Benjamin Franklin,” I say. “A Philadelphian. Not that it matters. Some old lady stopped him coming out of the Constitutional Convention, asked what the drafters had done. ‘What sort of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin?' That was his answer.”

“I see,” says Bendetsen. He nods his head as though reaching a decision. “So we've replaced the old troublemaker with a new one.” Now he looks up. “You're just another James Rowe, aren't you? All worked up over something that's been decided already.”

“Oh, no, Colonel.” I lean forward over his desk, doing my best to sound menacing. “I think you'll find I'm a good deal more than that.”

• • • • 

I sleep on the flight east, a full night's worth or more. Back in Washington, I still feel drained. What have I learned? That Gene Gressman was right about the Japanese cases, perhaps. There was plenty of time for individual hearings, Bendetsen said, time to sort the loyal from the disloyal. The evacuation is looking harder and harder to defend. And Bendetsen was right to see me as an enemy. I would send these people home if I could. Harry Nakamura and his children, Fumiko and her parents. George Yamaguchi and Masuo Kanno and all the rest. I would tear down the program on which he's built his career. He is right to fear me, if there is anything I can do.

But I am not sure there is. And none of this is going to help me figure out who would kill Gene, or who would encourage the detainees to renounce their citizenship. Or how those things might be connected.

I could report that there are strange doings at Tule Lake, I suppose. But I do not even know who at Main Justice I can rely on. I am confident in Francis Biddle, but he seems to be avoiding these cases. Ennis is a question mark; Hoover is out only for himself. Frankfurter is interested in my information,
but his men cannot help. The Happy Hot Dogs do not range that far west.

Bendetsen was right, I think sadly; I am just another James Rowe. Writing briefs I do not believe, uncertain whom I can trust. I think about the letter Rowe left in my desk drawer. There is my way out, my ticket back to Philadelphia. But I am not ready to give up yet. I walk circuits around the Great Court, wishing for help. Murals on the walls show paths to truth; Gressman's files offer names and circles in red ink. And when help comes, it takes me a long time to recognize it for what it is.

THE ENVELOPE ON
my desk is yellow and bulky. It comes from the Pentagon under John Hall's name. I slit the seams with a letter opener and pull out six hundred pages of typescript. A bold legend runs across the front page.
Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast
. It is General DeWitt's report on the evacuation.

I scan the cover letter quickly. Evacuation was impelled by military necessity. Thousands of American-born Japanese had gone to Japan to receive their education and had become rabidly pro-Japanese. Time was of the essence. The cooperation of the Department of Justice was appreciated, and great credit was due to the Japanese themselves for complying with the exclusion orders, under Army supervision and direction.

Chapter two details the need for military control and evacuation. I read it through with mounting puzzlement. Justice was indifferent to the security of the West Coast, the report says. We offered ineffectual half-measures; we refused to defer to the judgment of military officials on the scene; we withdrew in a huff if Francis Biddle's views were challenged. Whoever wrote it clearly hates James Rowe, which suggests to me that the author of this chapter, at least, is Karl Bendetsen.

Then I notice something else. Contraband was seized in spot raids, the report says, including dynamite and sixty thousand rounds of ammunition. Signal lights were often seen from the coast, and radio transmissions were
intercepted. The Japanese American population was tied to the Empire by race, filial piety, customs, and culture. They were a tight-knit, unassimilated racial group. Hundreds of pro-Japanese organizations were sending tinfoil across the Pacific . . .

I stop. These are the claims that the Pacific states made in their amicus brief in
Hirabayashi
, the curfew case. The facts Ennis has asked me to find, the claims that James Rowe carefully did not make on behalf of Justice. Here they are now in the voice of the War Department, in a report that stops just short of branding the men of Justice traitors. I pick up the phone.

“Hiya, Swell,” says John Hall. “Sorry, Cash. What can I do for you?”