Allegiance (50 page)

“I will not. Not until you explain to me what is going on here.”

The fog is lifting from my sight now, the room coming back into focus. I realize I am damp with sweat. “Nothing,” I say. “I was just leaving.”

Suzanne's head is high and her eyes are bright. “Then leave.”

The grandfather clock is ticking. Leather volumes on the walls hold the heroes of history. And more mysterious, more exotic, the bright fish of the law. But law and history alike are lies we tell ourselves to explain why things should be the way they are.

“It's all right,” the Judge says, and authority is back in his voice. “I'll be up in a moment.”

Suzanne gives me another long look, then she turns and leaves. I hear her feet going up the stairs and at last the stalled image completes itself in my mind: I see her rising through the green water, a pale girl wreathed in bubbles. But she is not rising to me. I think of wistaria climbing the wall at Merion and the way the air got heavy when evening came. I think of the boy who learned to play there, with his grip on the racquet like an honest handshake, gliding through the days in a golden cloud of athletic virtue.

I feel no connection to him. I have crossed over, and that childhood is as far away and strange as something that happened to someone else in a land beyond the sea. That boy is not me, though I am what he became. In the end he was not spared. That boy is gone and as dead as if he'd shipped out like cordwood to feed the fires of Europe, as if Miller had lifted the floorboards and made that empty lake my grave.

“So, Cash,” says the Judge. “How do we go on from here? Will you have that drink after all?”

“I will see you in jail,” I say.

“Will you? What can you prove?”

“I can prove your trades.” Now I know why they could not be traced to Joe Patterson.

“A man may profit from his knowledge. There is no law against that.”

“There may be one against how you gained the knowledge. The Court guards its secrets.”

He shrugs. “Go. Look through the records of the Philadelphia Exchange. You may find more than you expect. Your brother. Your father.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am not the only one who saw a profit.”

“They didn't know.” I am not sure of this, even as I say it.

Again he shrugs. “So they will say. But who will believe it? An ambitious prosecutor could make his name off theirs. Off yours. There are men like that in Philadelphia now.”

I am silent.

“Suzanne lost her mother years ago,” he says. He has gauged my reactions and decided where to strike. “And now you would take her father? You would do that to her as well. As if you have not done enough. That is your honor. No, I think we know what you will do.”

“This isn't about Suzanne,” I say. But she cannot be separated from it. I shut my eyes and there is a glow on the lids, like sun falling on the dock in Northeast Harbor, like the light from a movie screen. I see a world where lines are clean and principles like creases in paper, where we are only what we want to be and nothing is accidental. Where the tracks to Auschwitz splintered under Allied bombs and there never was a camp at Tule Lake for our flag to wave above.

But in that world the Judge and I do not face each other in this room. We are out riding or sailing or sitting on the deck at Merion watching the sun set over the great lawn. The vision burns in my mind like a flame, and like a flame it weakens and dies.

And the Judge says he thinks we know what I will do.

It is a low and harmless rumble now, the voice that used to freeze lawyers in their tracks. And it was never the voice, I realize, but what stood behind
it, the sword of justice and the majesty of law. Now there is an old man in a room with dusty books, and behind him the gathered shadows of hired guns and blades.

“He was the better one,” I say. “The one you didn't worry about. The man who was no one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gene Gressman,” I say. “He was worth ten of you, you fat old rotting fuck.”

I do not have the habit of cursing, and what this lacks in fluency it makes up for in surprise. The Judge sits looking at me with his mouth open, and that is how I leave him, an old man agape in a chair with his books and his shadows. And he can call the shadows down, but I do not think he will call them on me. He still believes there is something that connects us. It will be enough to stay his hand. But I am past that belief, and had Suzanne not walked through the door I do not know what could have stayed mine.

THE DRIVE BACK
to Washington takes longer. It is pitch-dark, for one thing. But more important, I am no longer rushing to confirm my fears. I know all I need about the conspiracy and my place in it, about why Gene Gressman and John Hall are dead.

What I do not know is what to do about it.

Joe Patterson will be dead soon, too. He and Richards are mostly blameless, anyway. Responsibility lies with Judge Skinner; the dark hand I sensed reached from that Haverford porch. I have looked too far afield for the enemy. There was no one else. It was us, always us, only us.

At my apartment, the door is unlocked. I freeze on the threshold, wondering what waits within. Against my expectations, the Judge has acted quickly. What did he choose for me: a gun, a club, a knife? Then I recognize the figure at the kitchen table. I turn on the light. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

Clara turns her eyes up. “Where were you? I was looking for you.”

“I had to go to Philadelphia.”

“I was looking and you weren't here.”

“I know,” I say. “I had to go to Philadelphia. How long have you been sitting here?”

“You didn't tell me.” She has been crying. For a long time, maybe for hours.

“I found out something important,” I say. “I was wrong about Cissy. I found Brutus.”

“So you went home.”

“Yes.” There is a magazine in front of her,
Time
. On its cover is one word:
Atrocities.

“I have made the same decision.”

“What?”

“I am going home.”

“To your apartment?” I do not understand.

“To Seattle.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is no place for me, Cash. I can't even get a decent job.”

“There are other places. There's Philadelphia.”

“Philadelphia,” says Clara, and she smiles. “How would they like me at your club?”

The glories of Merion rise to my mind, dinners on the balcony, sunset over the great lawn, fields of cricketers in white. They would not like Clara much there. “No one needs to know,” I say.

Clara catches her breath at that and looks away, blinking as though stung. When she turns back her eyes are bright. “That's not the right answer, wonder boy. And they would. They're good at finding that out, your people.”

“It doesn't matter,” I say. “That's what I meant.”

“Of course. That's what you meant. But it does matter.” She tosses the magazine to me. “You can read here how it matters.” I shake my head. “It was real,” she says. “It was real and we did nothing. And yet we must have known.”

I shake my head again. “We saved those people.”

Her eyes go back to the magazine. “They do not look saved.”

“We did the best we could.”

“No,” she says. “No you didn't. The boats you turned away. The trains you did not stop. There were women there. There were children.”

“Wait a second,” I say. “That wasn't me.”

“It was your friends,” Clara says. She rises and goes to the window, looking out into the night. “It was men like you. Jack McCloy, your Philadelphian.”

She is right, at least in part. We have talked about this in Justice, what will be done now, what could have been done before. But it still seems unfair. We are the good guys. “We fell short,” I say. “I know we did. And we probably
always will. But we'll always try, too, and if we're never perfect, we can always be better.”

Clara turns. For a moment there is nothing on her face. Then sadness, but so distant it is like the expression on a statue.

“Tell that to the children,” she says. “The girls and boys who are puffs of smoke. Tell them you can be better. I think they will agree.”

It washes over me like a wave, the magnitude of our mistakes, the utter impossibility of amends. All I have done, all I have failed to do. It is the feeling you get immediately after you cut yourself, just before the pain comes. There is the blood, there is the flesh laid open, but there is no sensation. Just a sick awareness that something's wrong, while part of your brain is still protesting that it can't possibly be
your
hand spread out before you like a gutted fish.

And then there is the pain.

“So I think I will go,” says Clara. “This is not my home.”

“This is America.”

“Of course. It is different here. But when they come, it is always different. It is always special. Every time, again and again, it is always just this once. Just this once and the world will be saved and nothing like it will ever have to happen again. Who would say no to that? Who can say it will never happen here?”

I remember Charles Fahy putting his authority behind the Final Report, the empty files on the Leupp detainees. “I can tell you one thing,” I say. I see Agent Skousen reversing the pistol in his hand, Kinzo Wakayama's fingers white on the pen as he signed his name. “It will never happen to you.” I try to think what in my eyes made Skousen draw the gun and Miller afraid to call my bluff, what made the Judge think I would pick up the poker.

“No, Cash,” she says. “It will never happen to you. And you should be happy about that. It means you can afford to look for the best in people. But it could happen to me, and I have to look for the worst. Roosevelt could have become a dictator. He didn't want to. But someday the people may give their trust to a man who does. You will be surprised how little they complain. Everyone likes to shout for their country. And why should you take that on yourself? Why have to worry that someone might come for your wife, for your children?”

“Because I love you,” I say.

“Ah,” says Clara. “There is the decisive pledge. But what recitation can prove your heart?”

Now I have nothing to say. I just look at her and after a moment she softens. “I know it,” she says. “I know it, my love.” For a moment I think she is going to cry, and then she masters herself and forces a smile. “But didn't I tell you? If you start with a cliché it leaves you nowhere to go.”

• • • • 

When she has left, I pour myself a glass of Scotch and get into bed. The night is half gone already, but it still seems an eternity until the dawn. I cannot empty my mind. The blue wedding china, the children with their clumps of grass, the dogs chasing trucks. After a few hours awake, I make another trip to the kitchen and come back with the bottle. The renunciants waiting for the ships to take them away, the piles of shoes. Suzanne and Clara, Gene Gressman and John Hall. All the people I have failed; all the people who died in my stead. It was not just a nightmare, that dream that burned through me while Clara watched. It was a prophecy. A world builds up, a world falls down. I lie in the dark, surrounded by all that is lost, waiting for nothing.

And nothing comes.

THE SKY HAS
fallen. It lies in pieces on the ground, which closer inspection proves puddles. I blame myself for not turning Joe and Cissy over to Hoover immediately, for saying the wrong thing to Clara, for being nothing but the impress of my history. I go to work and blame Charles Fahy and Herbert Wechsler. Clement spring turns merciless summer.

In August, our bombs fall. A new light sears the world. There will be no invasion of the Home Islands, no million casualties. The reprieve comes too late for Philip Haynes. A kamikaze pilot finds his troopship where it wallows off Okinawa. I have the news in a note from Frankfurter, handwritten on a black-edged card. I do not know whether he means to show regret or thinks it funny; either way, it is a ghoulish touch.

Japan surrenders on the fourteenth. As after the news of Pearl Harbor, no one knows what to do. Strong emotion needs expression and no formula lies ready to hand. Church bells ring; firecrackers explode at my feet. Strangers kiss in the street and drink strong liquor.

And the Alien Enemy Control Unit begins its final task. The renunciants are detained in San Francisco; the ships are fueling; the papers are being collated and stamped.

At Main Justice, I have my own papers. All the documents from my file on Joe Patterson rest now in a new one labeled
Skinner
. I can prove the trades, as I said. But the penalty for that is nothing commensurate to his crimes. I
am not sure it even exists—and if it does, it will hurt Suzanne, and maybe my own family, too.

There is also J. Edgar Hoover. If I tell Hoover this story, he will own the Judge. For a man like Sam Skinner, that would be torture. Hoover will hurt him more than the law can. And isn't that what I want, isn't that what he deserves?

I look down to see a new letter on my desk. It is from Harry Nakamura. I open it, remembering with a sudden flash of guilt that I failed to answer the earlier one about his wife, Sachiko. It comes back to me: she renounced; she could not undo it; she told him to take the children and leave her to her death. Another problem I cannot solve. I begin to read, hoping he has found an answer on his own.

But he has not. He is writing for a different reason. He has a legal question for me, he writes. He has heard that the sole parent of children who have retained citizenship will not be deported, even if that parent renounced.
It is a matter on which I should like to be definite
, he says.

Here is a question that I can answer, a rule that is comfortingly clear. I crank a sheet of paper into the typewriter. He is right about the law, I answer, but it has no application to his case. He is the citizen, not his wife. The suicide she threatens cannot affect him one way or the other. Only if he died could it become an issue . . .