Allegiance (46 page)

“You hid them?”

“They did not belong in the stockade,” he says. “Come, there is no time.”

I fire another shot out through the door and crawl toward him. We slide down into the pit and he pulls the boards into place above us. More shots go by overhead. Then they stop. In the silence I hear the distant siren of an alarm. Best is rousing his MPs. Soon they will be piling into jeeps; soon I will hear the rumble of the motors and the crunch of tires.

But first I hear the door open. I hear boots tramping above. There are two men, maybe three, tossing the furniture and swearing. “Where's the other door?” a voice asks.

Someone is standing almost right on top of me now. “I don't think there is one.” It is Agent Miller, speculation in his voice. He takes another step. Dirt drops from the floorboards onto my face, into my mouth. I try to blink it out of my eyes. I am thinking furiously, as though there is still some solution to grasp, as though I can figure out how the paths I have followed have come together in the dirt of this dry lake. And then my mind goes blank. There is
nothing but a flow of images. The open sky over the great lawn at Merion, the russet sweep of clouds. The raindrops falling on me and Suzanne under the trees on Bear Island, the beautiful silly giants on their lighted screens. The green and gold of Clara's eyes. The things I will never see again if Miller notices that the boards ring hollow beneath his boots.

I imagine understanding dawning on his face. I see him raising a hand, pointing downward, beckoning his men into position around us. What will happen then? Will he lift the boards to investigate? Or will he just shoot through them? I clutch the pistol at my side. If he looks first, I will get a shot off. And even if he fires straightaway, I may be capable of reply. He could hit Harry, or no one. But there are others. Their rifles will be ready. If he notices the hollow note underfoot, I will die, here in the California dirt.

But he does not. Voices are raised outside, in English and Japanese. “Get back in your apartment,” Miller yells, and someone answers his yell with their own defiant tones. Harry's neighbors do not know what is going on, but they do not like white faces behind rifles. And as Kinzo Wakayama told us, three men is not many this deep in the colony. I find myself praying there are enough Hoshidan left to rush the guns.

Miller pivots abruptly. “Time to go,” he says. The boots thud across the floor and out into the night. There is silence, and through it comes the rising hum of the motors. The MPs are here.

• • • • 

The trucks take 125 to Santa Fe that morning. The farewell is weaker, there is no doubt. I watch them pull away, olive drab canvas stretched over steel frames, streamers of exhaust rising like breath in the still air. I think about the men hunched in the back, about Kinzo Wakayama, who fought in the war to end all wars.

Agent Miller is nowhere to be found. Two others of my team are gone, three Relocation Authority men, and two jeeps from the motor pool. And Ray Best is angry. “What are you doing?” he demands.

“This is your camp.”

“And I had everything under control.”

“No you didn't. You had loyal American citizens being terrorized by traitors.”

“No one was shooting up the apartments and stealing my jeeps.” That is what irks him the most, I think, that he will have to report loss of federal property from his care.

As for pursuit, it is out of the question. I may take my team on foot; I may pack as many as I can into our black government cars, but I will have no help from Best. “That's not my job,” he says. “You're having trouble with your own men.”

“Some of yours, too.”

“Be realistic,” he says. One hand points to the empty expanse around us. “You'll never find them.”

He is right. We can notify the local Bureau branches, but if Miller and his fellows want to disappear, we will never see them again.

Harry and his family are plugging holes in their walls with cloth and sweeping up china.

“Those Relocation Authority men,” I ask. “Are they the ones who were encouraging people to renounce?”

“I do not know,” Harry says. “From the descriptions, perhaps. They may have been the ones asking for names of loyalists, too.”

“They were doing that?” Two sets of men, I think, making two lists. “Did people talk to them?”

“Some did.”

“Do you mean we've been taking out loyalists too?”

“You have taken some, yes.”

“And you didn't tell me?”

“I assumed you knew. They were taken at your direction, Mr. Harrison.”

“I never directed that,” I say. Like his remark about the American history test, this seems unfair. “You wouldn't tell me who was encouraging renunciation, either.”

He shrugs. “At the time, it was not evident which of my captors I should trust.”

I take a step back. “I'm not your captor.”

“You do not want to be. I can see that. But we are not only what we want to be.”

I bite my lip. “Tell me about these land reclamation agents.”

“They came to those who were renouncing. They offered compensation.”

“There's no compensation due,” I say. “That was not the government. That was people buying the land. What did they offer?”

“The certificates,” Harry says. “I can find you one.” He goes to a neighboring apartment and returns with a document. It looks official; there is italicized print, looping signatures, the stamp of a seal. But it is not the seal of any government.

And now I am hearing a raspy, puzzled voice, seeing a young man's uniform tight on an old man's paunch. For what I hold in my hand is a stock certificate for a bankrupt company. I have seen these certificates before; my father and his friends had plenty of them. One year, in fact, the members of the State in Schuylkill roasted their shad over a fire fed largely by the worthless stock of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad.

Joe Patterson's railroad.

“I HAVE TO
go back to Washington,” I tell Ray Best. “There will be no more marching here. No more bugles. No more salutes to the emperor. These people are Americans. All of that stops.”

“Or what? What can we threaten them with? They think removal is a reward.”

I click my teeth together in frustration. There are no good choices. I look at him for a moment. “Put the stockade back up.”

The next morning, some kids form a column in the firebreak. The MPs swoop in and grab the ones who don't run. We put fifteen in the stockade, and there are no more chants. The Hoshidan are gone, too, all we could find of them. The camp is calm again.

There are also 5,500 new-minted aliens, fruit of the hearings we conducted. I ride the train back with the boxes of renunciation forms. The sky burns overhead, scarlet and umber. At night, rain follows us across the rivers, tearing the black water to ragged silver under the moon. I look out the window until the light fails and the glass shows only my own reflection.

I reach Washington on Sunday, the day the Relocation Authority announces that the camps will be closing. Now it is official. The government gets there one day ahead of the Supreme Court, which hands down the decisions in
Korematsu
and
Endo
on Monday. I sit in the spectator gallery and listen to Black read his opinion. There was evidence of disloyalty, he says, and time
was of the essence. The Court cannot second-guess the military judgment. I cannot tell if he sees me or if he can read my expression; I do not know what that expression is. I feel tired, my face slack and heavy.

Clara hunches in the chair behind the Douglas column. Next to her, the Murphy clerk sits pale and still. There are still three votes against the government. Roberts reads from his dissent, then Murphy, then Jackson. By the time Douglas starts to announce
Endo
, most of the crowd is gone. They have their story: evacuation was justified. The camps are closing anyway;
Endo
hardly matters.

When the hand-down is over I sit on the marble steps below the great bronze doors. Workers have swept the snow on the plaza into banks around the empty fountains. I see Justice Roberts making his way down the stairs, walking slowly.

“Justice,” I call to him.

He stops. “Mr. Harrison.”

“I admire your opinion,” I say. “I just wanted to tell you that.”

Roberts blinks against the wind. “You never knew the Old Court. They say we stood in the way of progress. Perhaps we did. But we stood there for liberty.” He coughs. “Now we are just Roosevelt's men. It is not the Court I knew. I will be leaving at the end of the year. For all of us, there is a moment to alight the train of history. And you?”

“I don't know,” I say. “I'm at Justice for a while.”

Roberts pulls his coat tighter. “Tell Francis Biddle this is what his New Deal brought.”

I watch him walk away, careful on the stone. He has tried to hold the line and failed. Now he is going back to Philadelphia. The dean's chair waits for him at the law school. He will take it for a dollar a year, just as the captains of industry came to Washington to serve the New Deal he flees. He will tell the students that the country around them is not the one that lives in his mind.

It is the time-honored response of Philadelphians whose wisdom the nation has rejected. At that moment I think it has much to recommend it. But I am not quite done here.

At Main Justice, the boxes of renunciation forms lie in my office, awaiting Francis Biddle's signature. I sift through them, remembering the hearings I
conducted. So many answers about the Sacred Shrine, so many about Emperor Jimmu. So many scared faces. Fumiko's form is in my hands. Now it is ripping. A strip peels off the side, then another. The sound of paper tearing is a girl's voice singing. A white ribbon drops into my wastebasket. Fumiko looks out through the fence, across the desert sea. Another ribbon falls. Harry Nakamura lifts a floorboard from a shallow grave.

“Am I interrupting something, Mr. Harrison?”

Clyde Tolson stands in the doorway. I drop the rest of the form into the trash. “No.”

“Good. Come with me.” He does not take me by the elbow this time, but his demeanor is the same as on our first trip to see the Director. We pass the murals, the agents, the receptionist. Hoover sits at his desk on the raised platform, a little man with his enormous flags. Tolson takes his place against the wall and Hoover turns his head in my direction.

“What are you doing, Mr. Harrison?”

“I'm doing my job.”

“What happened in Tule Lake?”

“Don't you know? One of your pretty boys tried to kill me.”

There is a burst of noise in my left ear as Tolson slaps the side of my head. I turn and he's got his fists up in a fighting pose. “The Director asked you a question.”

“It's all right, Clyde.” Hoover stands, hands splayed on his desk. “We will find Special Agent Miller. But I would like to know what you think you are investigating.”

I look at him a moment. The answer is pretty clear to me now. The stock certificates are just another attempt to make a quick buck, the consistent goal of Richards's Anti-Federalist friends. And if Brutus and the Farmer aren't Joe and Cissy Patterson, I'll eat my hat. I could just give Hoover their names. But what would he do with the information? Put it in a file, use it to increase his power, demand their cooperation? It would be unpleasant for them; it would be punishment of a sort. But something in me rebels at the idea. “Sorry,” I say. “Couldn't hear you. Kind of a ringing in my ear right now.”

Hoover smiles thinly. “You are freelancing, Mr. Harrison. You are pursuing
your own agenda. I can help you with that. But I have explained already, you must do things for me in return.”

“Sorry,” I say again. I try to sound like Colonel Richards, the man of principle. “I don't play that game.”

“How about that, Clyde?” Hoover asks. “He doesn't play that game.”

“So I hear,” Tolson says.

“Don't you get tired of being the straight man, Clyde?” I ask. I turn back to Hoover and try to tell myself he doesn't scare me. This small man on his raised platform with his giant flags. “I'm not afraid of you, Director.” But it doesn't have quite the ring of truth I was going for. I am not Richards.

More to the point, Hoover is not me. His smile grows broader. “That's how I know you're in over your head. Say hello to your friend.”

“Who?” I ask. But some primitive part of my nervous system shrieks an alarm, starts a tingling along my spine. It spreads to my shoulder blades. I know who he's talking about. I sent them after her in the first place.

“Clara,” says Hoover. “Watson, isn't it?”

“So I hear,” says Tolson. He smiles as though he's managed to get off a joke.

“That is the game you're playing, Mr. Harrison. You are not the only piece on the board. Ask her if she thinks you should cooperate.”

“Ask her,” Tolson repeats as he shows me out. But I have no intention of that. I have moved past fear to anger. Hoover can bluster, but he cannot do any real harm. He has nothing on us, and I have other questions in mind. At Dupont Circle, I see the familiar enveloping wings of Cissy Patterson's house and walk straight into their embrace.

A man in a dark suit answers the door.

“I'm looking for Joe Patterson,” I say.

“Mr. Patterson is not receiving callers today.”

I produce my card. “You can tell him it's not a social visit.”

The man makes no move to take it. “He is not receiving callers.”

I push the card forward until it buckles against his chest. “The Department of Justice would like a word with him.”

He seems skeptical. “And they sent you?”

“Tell him it's about the Anti-Federalist Society. And it will be the FBI next time. His choice.”