Allegiance (34 page)

“I'm not a professional either.” I could send Agent Miller, I suppose. But I have already broadened his responsibilities beyond what Biddle authorized, and Hoover will not miss a chance to punish me if he finds out.

“But you are young,” says Frankfurter. “You are quick on your feet. I would like you to give it a try.”

• • • • 

That project will wait till the end of the day. Back at Main Justice, there is a new stack of papers on my desk. The opening briefs in
Korematsu
and
Endo
have come in, the arguments I must answer with or without the War Department's facts. It is time to meet the plaintiffs.

Mitsuye Endo I know at a glance. She is a test plaintiff, handpicked by the ACLU. As they chose Eagle Scout Gordon Hirabayashi to challenge the curfew, they have found an indisputably loyal woman to attack detention. A typist for the State of California before they let her go, a brother in the army. She has never been to Japan; she doesn't speak the language. No one could call her a threat to America. Justice offered to release her already, I see, to make the case go away, but she refused.

Fred Korematsu is different. Like everyone else, he has his Pearl Harbor story. He was parked with his girl, listening to Tommy Dorsey and looking out at the Oakland hills, when the announcers broke in. Five months later he was ordered to Tanforan Assembly Center, the dusty racetrack where Kuwabara's cot sank into the melting asphalt.

But Korematsu did not go to Tanforan. He wanted to stay with his girl, Ida Boitano, to settle with her somewhere in the Midwest. He got surgery on his eyes; he changed the name on his draft card to Clyde Sarah. When the police picked him up he told them he was a Mexican from Hawaii.

He spoke no Spanish. They were not fooled. And so he went to Tanforan after all.

From the camp he sent Ida letters. She wrote back telling him to send no more.
She was originally engaged to subject and planned to marry him
, her FBI interview says,
but she now realizes that such a marriage is impossible and that she made a big mistake. She is now sorry that she did not report subject to the proper authorities when he refused to give himself up.
That is what the girls say in this situation, what they are supposed to say.

Korematsu was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to probation. The judge ordered him released back into Oakland; the War Department disagreed. Military police took him from the courtroom at gunpoint. He went back to Tanforan and then to the Topaz camp in Utah. And now he asks the Court to set him free.

How to answer? That is not the question, I realize. James Rowe was not
answering arguments when he wrote the
Hirabayashi
brief. He was not just resisting the corrupting influence of War, not just doing his duty. He was trying to lose. That is why he was drafted; that is the meaning of the letter in the drawer.

And that is what I want to do now. I would send these people home if I could, I thought on the plane back from Eureka, and now I can. Why not? Something is giving way inside me. Something has torn all the way through, that has been a long time fraying. For a moment I see my bathroom mirror, the single word come clean against the fog.
Traitor
. Then it is wiped away. I can send these people home with a Supreme Court decision paving the way, telling the nation they are loyal, they are like us after all.

All I need to do is figure out how to sabotage the government's position without betraying myself to Edward Ennis or anyone else. I blow out my breath in a sigh. It was beyond James Rowe's ability. But he wasn't a Supreme Court clerk, Biddle's fair-haired boy, a young genius, perfect and untamed.

The pep talk is unconvincing. Who has called me a genius recently? A girl who lied to me the last time we spoke. I put the papers down and go to find Clara.

• • • • 

Waiting at the Court brings back memories, some fond, some bittersweet. Watching my briefcase sail down the steps, running with Gene to the printer's office. Black sitting on the corner of my desk. Gene swearing he'd figure it all out . . . and me raising his ghostly fingerprints for Hoover's techs.

It is still only a little after five, and Douglas clerks tend to work late. It should be no surprise that the first figure I recognize leaving the Court is Hugo Black, but still I feel a jolt as the familiar hat emerges. He is walking in my direction; as he nears I can hear his whistle. “London Bridge.” I know I should turn away—chatting with a justice is not the way to pick up Clara's trail unobserved—but I can't move, and as he passes I hear myself say, “Judge.”

Black starts. “Cash!” Surprise gives way to enthusiasm. “Returning to the scene of the crime?”

My laugh is forced. “How are you?” He shrugs. “How's Josephine?”

The answer flits across his face, and it is not the word that follows. “Fine.” He nods, reaching for something else. “JoJo, now. She's not scared of the dark anymore, but she goes around sneezing all the time. You teach her that?”

“It worked for me as a kid.”

Black laughs. “So, you're with Francis Biddle now. You learn your purpose yet?”

“I'm thinking so, Judge.”

“What are you doing for him?”

“Working on the Japanese cases. Have you seen any of the filings yet?”

Black's face changes, and he takes a step back. “Oh,” he says. “We can't talk about that.”

“No,” I say. It would be so easy; it would make everything so simple. But he would never break that rule. “I suppose not.”

He must see something in my eyes, for he tilts his head, questioning. Then he slaps my shoulder. “When it's done, Cash. When it's done we'll have a beer.”

I watch him walk away. He has been playing tennis; sunburn stripes the back of his neck where the skin folds as he bends to return serve. The red clay court comes back to me, the evenings in his kitchen, his story about the Pledge of Allegiance and how he'd changed his mind. Other people make children raise their arms, not us. But who puts their own citizens in camps? Black will do it, I think. He cannot save Josephine; he cannot bring his boys home, but this thing he can do. Hugo Black is the key that will open the gates of Tule Lake.

I almost miss Clara as she comes out the Maryland Avenue entrance and heads north along First Street, walking fast. She is wearing a navy pin-striped skirt with a matching three-button jacket that hugs her waist. I find myself wondering whether she made it herself, then push the thought aside. I try to imagine her as a spy, infiltrating the Court. It would be an alien world, its customs and language unfamiliar. Its inhabitants would stare, seeing her as irreducibly other. It is not possible, I think. They would not send a woman.

And yet . . . She herself said that Douglas is a wolf. She can get his attention in a way Vern Countryman could not. She is from Washington, like Karl Bendetsen. And in a way I cannot fully explain, she has given me the feeling there is something she hides.

At Union Station she boards a streetcar going up Massachusetts Avenue. And perhaps Frankfurter has put it in my mind, but I would swear that as she mounts the steps she is looking around to be sure she isn't followed.

I get a taxicab and tell the driver to hang a few cars back from the trolley. Traffic is heavy, and the trick is not getting ahead of her. My driver manages it with aplomb, slipping behind slower vehicles, changing lanes indecisively. She alights a few blocks before Dupont Circle and plunges into the crowd. This too seems a strategic choice, for as I follow her we pass several other streetcar stops.

Like Dante's vision of Hell, Dupont Circle has concentric rings, cars and buses wheeling around in a confusion of horns. Unlike Dante's, but probably true to the real thing, it is filled with bureaucrats. Blue and gray suits jostle on the sidewalks, queue up on the traffic islands between rivers of cars. Clara weaves through the crowd. She has an advantage: most of them are at least slightly reluctant to collide with her, but I receive no such solicitude. Every now and then she turns her head and I have to duck or turn myself, which makes the collisions more frequent. A fat man in a glen plaid thinks it warrants a remark. “Young man,” he says, raising a thick finger. “Young man!”

I've lost her. A sea of backs ahead of me, through which bobbing faces approach. I push between a man and his wife, wondering why they're standing still, and learn the answer when I step into the street in front of oncoming traffic. Horns blare as I jump back. A car whooshes past just in front of me. Through the back window the face of a young girl stares out, pale and receding like a drowning person. “Young man,” someone says. The burst of adrenaline sharpens my senses. I pick Clara out on the next ring in, packed with people. The light changes; we shift forward and cross into the circle. And I see that she is not alone.

The man is keeping pace just a bit in front of me. He has probably been with us for some time, but it is only the way he moves forward, his eyes four bodies ahead, that shows me he is following her.

Of course, I think. A Happy Hot Dog. Frankfurter still has a man in place.

He maintains his distance as they traverse the circle. Before she reaches the fountain at the center, Clara cuts back toward New Hampshire Avenue. Now I'm sure that she's trying to spot a tail, since it would have been much quicker
to walk a quarter-turn around. But she hasn't made this man, nor me as far as I can tell.

The lights catch us again on the way out. He is at the back of the crowd on her island, while I'm still in the circle proper. I almost call to him, to tell him he can sit this dance out. But something stops me. His shoulders don't look right inside the suit; they bunch and swell as he moves. One arm takes the man immediately ahead and moves him aside like a child. This is no agricultural economist, no one Frankfurter would know. This man is from somewhere else.

As I watch he takes another man from his path. “Sir!” Clara is at the front, standing on the curb, waiting for the light. His hat moves through the crowd. “Watch it, pal.” The plan is no longer to follow unobserved. And suddenly I am sure of what he intends. Douglas is a valuable Justice, with his anti-government tendencies. Frankfurter may indeed have picked off one of their men by arranging the Murphy clerk's exit. A packed crowd, a stumble, an accident. They want to open another slot.

I start pushing forward myself. He still has some concern for stealth, which I do not, and I move faster. I call her name, but she does not look back. “Clara!” I yell again.

I get to the curbside. The cars gush past in torrents. I think of the icy water that takes your breath on impact. My breath, her breath. Suzanne vanishes into the ocean, Josephine fades away as we reach for her. But this one will not be lost. This one I will save.

The hat is right behind Clara now; the man's shoulders gather as his arms come up. I stand there trying to calculate whether I'm sure enough about this to make it worth throwing myself into traffic. And then before I can decide I find myself off the curb and dashing across the street.

The horn distracts him, I think; or if not that, then the screech of brakes and the crunch of the fender as the car behind slams into the one that stopped for me. Just then the light changes anyway, and the crowd surges forward. Clara heads across the street. The man starts to follow, but I'm on him in seconds. I seize his shoulder and he turns. Face-to-face, he is a gorilla, suit jacket bunching above his trapezius muscles, hat riding up on his
head. I realize with a flash of alarm that I haven't planned anything past this moment. “Forget it,” I say. “It's off.”

“What?” The puzzlement is real, but he knows what I'm talking about. He just doesn't know how I fit in.

“We're blown,” I say, improvising desperately. “The FBI is all around us.” He scowls suspiciously, and I push him off in the opposite direction. “Split up. Lie low. We'll contact you.”

It's convincing, or convincing enough. He slopes off and I turn back to the street, trying to find the navy blazer with the fitted waist. I cross to the sidewalk, look in both directions, run one way to glance down New Hampshire and then the other to scan P Street. Nothing. Or not Clara. What I see, when I raise my eyes, is the spread wings of Cissy Patterson's house.

Not possible
, I think.
Possible
, retorts a tiny voice in my head.
She hesitated when she saw where you were going; she didn't want to come here.

It was too grand
, I say.
It scared her
.

It was too familiar
, the voice answers.
She knew people there already; she was scared you'd discover the connection
.

The memories of that night change their aspect in my mind like an optical illusion. Cissy with the daggers in her smile, displeased to see Clara again. The duck becomes a rabbit. The whole scene between them an act for my benefit. The beautiful girl turns into an old hag. I stand there blinking in front of the house. Then something hard is pressed into my back and a voice tells me to reach for the sky.

IT IS CLARA.
I turn around.

“Bang,” she says. The suit hugs her waist; her eyes glow gold in the setting sun. “I warned you, buster.” She cocks her thumb like a pistol, taps my chest with stiff fingers.

I fold them in my hand and shift her aim aside. “What are you doing?”

“I should ask you that question. Except that I know. So I will ask why.”

“Why what?”

“Why were you following me?”

“I was yelling your name.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

“But you didn't turn around?”

“I did not wish to see you then. You recall our last parting.”

“I remember saying I was sorry.” A pause. “I'm still sorry. I was thoughtless. I didn't want that to happen.”